When we know everything.

[xelasnave]

The question popped into my head when reading Garys lattest post in the science section and I asked him..what will we do when we know everything..

But I thought better to ask it here.

What will it be like when humans know everything?

We sometimes even now seem to be close to knowing everything but say in another 500 years or even 5000 assuming we happily survive..well take as long as you want...

What will it be like?

alex

[JA]

You can never know what you don't know, so .....

Best
JA

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by JA

You can never know what you don't know, so .....

Best
JA

but what about went we do know what we dont know we dont know.
alex

[AndrewJ]

Gday Alex

Interesting premise but will never happen
ie What (exactly) will the surface of the sun look like tomorrow.
Where (exactly) will rain fall tomorrow.

Andrew

[AstralTraveller (David)]

Lotto will go out of business.

[RickS (Rick)]

Gödel, Turing, Chaitin et al have already proven that we* can't know everything.

* everybody except my wife

[gary]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the post.

At the risk of quoting myself when I responded in the thread you mentioned,
when you asked, "what happens when we know everything" ...

Originally Posted by gary

Hi Alex,

Thankfully the Gödel incompleteness theorem might pop up before then
and get in the way and we never will be able to prove absolutely
everything, leaving some stuff still an eternal mystery.

Turns out that there may be hints of that in the real world already.

For example, this 9 Dec 2015 article in Nature by Davide Castelvecchi
discusses that there is a related problem in quantum particle physics
— which has a US$1-million prize attached to it — could be
unsolvable in a way analogous to the types of statements that
Kurt Gödel so disturbingly demonstrated were "undecidable" back in 1931.

See :-
http://www.nature.com/news/paradox-a...erable-1.18983

Since the Austrian mathematician Gödel logically proved that not
all statements of logic or mathematics can be proven to be either true
or false, then it follows we can't ever know everything.

How deeply that may manifest itself in the real material world - the world
of physics - is yet to be seen.

When you say "know everything", for the purposes of current discussion
I would take that to mean "knowing the theory of operation of how
all physical things work".

We've unpeeled many layers of the onion, in areas such as particle physics,
and so far so lucky.

But as in the Nature article I cited above, perhaps we might encounter a
real-world example of the incompleteness theorem.

Then one might argue it is logically impossible to ever know everything
about the laws of physics.

In one sense, that would be very sad.

But if you can retain a sense of humour, it could be pretty funny - the ultimate last laugh.

If I was a God, that is what I would do. Lead you down a wild goose chase
examining smaller and smaller sub-atomic particles but then just when you
are one step away from the final piece of the puzzle, end it in a Gödel
paradox that you can never prove one way or the other.

And then as this hypothetical God, I would hide myself away behind that
paradox laughing a lot.

Thankfully I am not a God and have no illusions of emulating one.

But we might all need to be prepared to pack our collective sense of
humour if we end up proving we can't know everything about the physical
world.

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by AndrewJ

Gday Alex

Interesting premise but will never happen
ie What (exactly) will the surface of the sun look like tomorrow.
Where (exactly) will rain fall tomorrow.

Andrew

Would it not be possible to make models that could indeed tell us those things...if we could measure and input all the data maybe it could be done..we certainly know, unless we are wrong, how these things work.

Alex

[julianh72 (Julian)]

Originally Posted by RickS

Gödel, Turing, Chaitin et al have already proven that we* can't know everything.

And don't forget Heisenberg!

Motorcycle Cop: "Do you know how fast you were driving back there?"
Heisenberg: "No, Officer, but I know where I am."

[julianh72 (Julian)]

Originally Posted by gary

Since the Austrian mathematician Gödel logically proved that not
all statements of logic or mathematics can be proven to be either true
or false, then it follows we can't ever know everything.

But how do we know Gödel was right?

My brain hurts!

[xelasnave]

Gary
I thank you for engaging the prospect of the possibility that humans we could know everything.

You correctly sort to refine and move to correctly define what know everything really means.

It is hard to move away from science on this one but perhaps a point could come in our future that notwithstanding our current logic some fundamental is exposed , one which I could not predict or define but perhaps of a nature of apes starting to walk upright event, certainly one unknown now...
But the day arrives and we have it all worked out...
Sortta where I feel I have reached.

What humans call Gods must know everything ...

Well the question could be approached from another angle...if we don't know everything what is it that we must know to be able to know everything so the question is simply what is it that we do not know.
Alex

[gary]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

Would it not be possible to make models that could indeed tell us those things...if we could measure and input all the data maybe it could be done..we certainly know, unless we are wrong, how these things work.

Alex

Hi Alex,

Say you could keep track of the motions of every particle.

As Julian just alluded to, Heisenberg then gets in the way.

But even if you were to put that aside for one moment and let's say one
could know the position and velocity of every particle in the Universe.

The other day I posted a link to a story in Nature about quantum thermodynamics.

See :-
https://www.nature.com/news/the-new-...-rules-1.22937

That article made mention of the solution to the Maxwell's Daemon paradox.

Originally Posted by Zeeya Merali, Nature

But the solution to a famous thought experiment, laid out 150 years ago by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, provided a clue about where to turn, posing an intriguing link between information and energy. Maxwell imagined an entity that could sort slow- and fast-moving molecules, creating a temperature difference between two chambers simply by opening and closing a door between them.

Such a 'demon', as it was later called, thus generates a hot and a cold chamber that can be harnessed to produce useful energy. The problem is that by sorting particles in this way, the demon reduces the system's entropy — a measure of the disorder of the particles' arrangements — without having done any work on the particles themselves. This seemingly violates the second law of thermodynamics.

But physicists eventually realized that the demon would pay a thermodynamic price to process the information about the molecules' speeds. It would need to store, erase and rewrite that information in its brain. That process consumes energy and creates an overall increase in entropy3. Information was once thought to be immaterial, “but Maxwell's demon shows that it can have objective physical consequences”, says quantum physicist Arnau Riera, at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain.

In a similar vain, to keep track of the positions and velocities of all particles
in the Universe you would need to build a memory store, its size
necessitating it probably be of a similar number of particles to what you
were tracking leading, to a paradox. Such a computer would even need
to track itself.

You might need another alternate Universe in which to store and run the computer.

But even if you were satisfied just to know all the governing laws of the
Universe without keeping track of particles in models, Gödel, Turing
and friends might get in the way first.

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by julianh72

But how do we know Gödel was right?

My brain hurts!

You could think that any attempt to confine what we could know could not be right.
Alex

[gary]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

Well the question could be approached from another angle...if we don't know everything what is it that we must know to be able to know everything so the question is simply what is it that we do not know.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the post.

That's a tough question!

Hmmm. I might need to brush up on my Donald Rumsfeld before answering with any certainty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by gary

Hi Alex,

Say you could keep track of the motions of every particle.

As Julian just alluded to, Heisenberg then gets in the way.

But even if you were to put that aside for one moment and let's say one
could know the position and velocity of every particle in the Universe.

The other day I posted a link to a story in Nature about quantum thermodynamics.

See :-
https://www.nature.com/news/the-new-...-rules-1.22937

That article made mention of the solution to the Maxwell's Daemon paradox.



In a similar vain, to keep track of the positions and velocities of all particles
in the Universe you would need to build a memory store, its size
necessitating it probably be of a similar number of particles to what you
were tracking leading, to a paradox. Such a computer would even need
to track itself.

You might need another alternate Universe in which to store and run the computer.

But even if you were satisfied just to know all the governing laws of the
Universe without keeping track of particles in models, Gödel, Turing
and friends might get in the way first.

Thank you for engaging the problem.
As you observe it has been written into science the uncertainty humans currently have in observing particles..the uncertainty comes not from the mechanism that governs the path of a particle but upon our ability to observe all its "being" simultaneously.
So from your input I can conclude one thing that we do not know and that is how to remove the necessity to operate via probability which our limited power of observation enables and be able to say all things about a particle.
And now the problem you point to arises ... Which is one more thing we don't know...how to contain a model of the universe, and the explaination would seem to then require more room than offered by the current universe...so we don't know how to house such a model...

Alex

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by gary

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the post.

That's a tough question!

Hmmm. I might need to brush up on my Donald Rumsfeld before answering with any certainty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk

I agree with his observation.

But knowing such is helpful.

Alex

[gary]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

Which is one more thing we don't know...how to contain a model of the universe, and the explaination would seem to then require more room than offered by the current universe...so we don't know how to house such a model...

Hi Alex,

I use to have a couple of late 80's vintage Apollo DN1000 Personal
Supercomputers in my garage.

See http://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/m...hure_Jul88.pdf

CERN use to use the same type of computers for particle physics computations alongside their Crays.

They were so large that fitting both the supercomputers and the car into the garage was problematic.

So I've come across this problem of trying to squeeze the car
and the computers into the same finite universe before.

The car ended up winning. It also consumed less energy than the supercomputers did.

[Visionary (David)]

Enough of all this theology already!

[RickS (Rick)]

Originally Posted by gary

I use to have a couple of late 80's vintage Apollo DN1000 Personal
Supercomputers in my garage.

See http://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/m...hure_Jul88.pdf

That brings back memories, Gary. I was working for Apollo when the DN10000 was released.

[gary]

Originally Posted by julianh72

But how do we know Gödel was right?

My brain hurts!

Hi Julian,

You just want to make us all try and get our heads around the
Gödel numbering proof again and make all our heads hurt!

Einstein was quoted by a colleague as wanting to work at the
Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton in order "to have the privilege
of walking home with Gödel".

I wonder if Einstein ever said during one of those walks, "OK ... no, damn,
I wish I was smarter ... Kurt, could you please explain it to me again
one more time ..."