Thread: What are your favourite simple things that science just cannot explain?

Originally Posted by tommo

I think that's true in a way. Like you could say "There are these things called Torsons which cause magnets to attract" or whatever but if they don't relate to anything you already know of, like some common thing, you won't understand it anyway. You would have to figure out what Torsons do/their rules etc.

It always leads to more questions and you just have to accept that those Torsons cause magnetism. Maybe one day everything will be proven, but you still just have to learn that these are the rules of these new things you've found.

Is that pretty much what you're saying Xei?

Yes, pretty much.

It's interesting you bring up action at a distance. Many philosophers and scientists think this inherently absurd. I do not. I do not see the difference between the assertion 'a particle moves away from a body due to the torsive force acting on the particle' and 'the body constantly sends out a steam of meso-torsive particles. Some of these particles hit the particle in question and cause it to recoil'. I think the latter is just billiard balls again; humans don't ever see action at a distance on their scale, there are always intermediaries. This doesn't mean we should make a general principle out of this and apply it to everything in the universe. There is no a priori argument that makes action at a distance impossible; it's just intuition, and I think intuition just means 'prejudice from expose solely to a certain set of circumstances'. We just have one hypothetical assertion on one hand (the body 'just does' make the particle move away) and another hypothetical assertion on the other (the body 'just does' emit meso-torsives; these cause particles to recoil).

I think you can find parallels here with people who reject quantum physics.

Originally Posted by Wayfaerer

Couldn't you say fields and charges "explain" the observation of magnetism? Couldn't you say the relativity of space and time "explain" the constancy of light? You could define magnetism as the pure observation itself, but isn't the point of science the attempt to look beyond that and seek hidden relationships with other seemingly separate observations and explain them in terms of better pictures and ideas for whats actually going on? Sure, all we have to work with is what we experience, but does that really devalue the explanatory power of science?

I never said the explanatory power is devalued. I just said what it is, take it or leave it. I'm a man of science myself; I think science is extremely valuable, and if we take explanation to mean showing that complex phenomena have some small, simple set of rules behind them, then science is the very pinnacle of explanation. Science has many different 'points'. The pertinent one to this discussion is explaining a phenomenon via reduction to simpler, more general observations. We just have to accept that with any such explanation, it is going to rest on assertions; the act of explanation cannot go on forever, and nothing can explain itself. There are no 'ultimate explanations' of any particular phenomenon where a human is going to say 'ah yes, I see', and that thing will be completely explained in itself. It just seemed to me that this common assumption was contained within Dannon's question.

Originally Posted by Xei

Yes, pretty much.

It's interesting you bring up action at a distance. Many philosophers and scientists think this inherently absurd. I do not. I do not see the difference between the assertion 'a particle moves away from a body due to the torsive force acting on the particle' and 'the body constantly sends out a steam of meso-torsive particles. Some of these particles hit the particle in question and cause it to recoil'. I think the latter is just billiard balls again; humans don't ever see action at a distance on their scale, there are always intermediaries. This doesn't mean we should make a general principle out of this and apply it to everything in the universe. There is no a priori argument that makes action at a distance impossible; it's just intuition, and I think intuition just means 'prejudice from expose solely to a certain set of circumstances'. We just have one hypothetical assertion on one hand (the body 'just does' make the particle move away) and another hypothetical assertion on the other (the body 'just does' emit meso-torsives; these cause particles to recoil).

Well, there is a difference. One is like an electrical circuit where the charge won't even go through the wire until it is connected to the opposite -ode.
The other would be where like a current of electricity going through the wire constantly, ready to be attracted to something else.

I dunno, kind of not much to say about that lol
Neither is absurd though.

Well ya they are objectively different, I just meant not different with respects to the fact that the former isn't any more absurd.