I apologize for taking three months to respond to this. Clearly I don't get around here often.
Aeokirr said:
Impossible IS absolute. I only think of what is impossible as something that breaks the fundamental rules of physics, not just current theories.
Okay. From the perspective of actual science, that is the stupidest thing ever. There are no "fundamental rules" in science, there are only the best of current theories. Newtonian physics was once thought to be fundamental, then Einstein came along with Spec and Gen Relativity and that went out the window (or at least was only applicable in classical application, which is non-exhaustive.) Einstein himself had a huge problem with FTL entanglement, since he was so certain any interaction FTL was highly problematic (he thought the limiting factor of the speed of light was a "fundamental rule" and had a huge hang up with the idea that it could be violated,) but oh, here comes John Stewart Bell with his inequalities, and there goes that out the window (to the best of current knowledge: for the most part local hidden variable theory has been disproved in favor of nonlocality, which is, um... oh yes, interaction AT FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT, which you claim violates a fundamental rule of physics, and are very highly likely to be wrong about.) I'm going to point out again because it really baffles me that some learned person in a supposedly scientific field could make such an egregious error, so here it is: there are no ABSOLUTE rules in science. There are tremendously likely theories, theories that have been supported by enormous amounts of data, but to say they are infallible is to 1.) turn science into a faith, and 2.) ignore that similarly absolute-seeming rules have been turned over before in the past.
I understand that engineering is not science, because as where science seeks to know and understand and tear apart at the insides of idea about what is (in the contexts that it can be observed) as much as possible, engineering usually has a goal, an end-point, and has to follow pragmatic paths to get there. In that sense, it is impossible to utilize FTL travel in any pragmatic way and may thus be disregarded in nearly all cases. But science, especially super high minded shit like cosmology or fundamental particle mechanics (and even here the idea of a "fundamental" is a misnomer because the ideas proposed by string theory point to mere geometries of embedded dimensions from which these "fundamental particles" are derived,) starts to reveal that the more we find out about the more we find that the concrete understanding and certain-ness we have about the universe is really rather lacking, and we're more and more likely to uncover mysteries of ever increasing degrees of convolution, rather than that everything will package nicely into a few headers that will describe in precise detail what the absolute limits are. So yeah, pretty fucking useless on the scale of day to day life and I can see why you wouldn't be super concerned with its application. On the other hand, I went to art school, if I have a handle on this shit, you have no fucking excuse.
Aeokirr said:
Both are POSSIBLE, but well. I can say that it is impossible that i can fly to the moon naked doing nothing but flapping my arms.
Dude, I mean, really? First of all, not really relevant to science, what you individually can or cannot do, second of all it wasn't too long ago that propulsion in space was thought totally impossible, and even now we're finding organisms that can manage the vacuum of space, so the relevant general hypothesis, that a purely organic organism cannot travel from an oxygen rich atmosphere, through space, to a non-atmospheric body, is probably up for grabs. Third of all, if we're going to get all into specifics (which is useless, but then again, I am arguing on an internet forum so who am I to talk about futility, I mean I could say it's impossible for me to teleport to Japan from where I sit in New England, and sure, yes, that is the case, practically, but what science has to say is that universally it is incredibly unlikely that such an event could take place, but doesn't say with absoluteness that it cannot at all) I propose to you this scenario: At some point within your life time some event of great magnitude occurs and the moon crashes into earth. Miraculously you survive, and through some more dubious but not impossible technobabble the earth and moon are still mostly intact. You travel to where the point of contact is, and there, with the earth-moon gravitational field shifted enough away from the earth's current center of mass, you find that perhaps it is feasible that you could propel yourself from the earth's surface to the moon's under your own power. However, as I've pointed out, none of this is science, because what science does is take specific tests to make general theories (of which your statement about the impossibility of you flapping to the moon is not), while engineering takes those theories and builds specific systems with them. (Which is why, to go to the moon, we had von Braun build some huge badass rockets, because the highly unlikely case of humans traveling to the moon is not in fact impossible.)
Aeokirr said:
Empirical testing does not make impossible things any less impossible.
I had to pull this out in particular because, um, yes it does. It does it all the fucking time. Or rather it shows that what was
thought to be impossible is actually only a really close idea based on what information we had. If, for example, you went back to Revolution era America and said to someone, "it is impossible to pass directly through a tree without damaging or altering it in some way," they would emphatically agree with you. Now we know that neutrinos do this all the time. Hell for a while it was "impossible" for bumblebees to fly, based on everything we knew about aerodynamics, and yet despite all of our perfectly rational and descriptive rules, fly they did, empirically proving our theories were wrong, and it wasn't until we developed better theories that we had an understanding of the finer forces at work to make such a thing possible. Point in fact (god it's going to be hilarious if you do actually read this and
still try to argue that there are fundamental absolutes in science,) yet again, is that impossible is
only relative to the current degree of our understanding of the systems at play. And we are nothing if not desperately, woefully ignorant about the depth and breadth of those systems (how can we make any claim to a sovereign understanding of the forces of the universe when we have no data that doesn't come from within our own Oort sphere, much less beyond what may well be reality bending mechanics of the local mass of our galaxy?) Understanding of the universal constraint of the speed of light is little more than one human lifetime old. Much of the relevant current information is from within a couple of generations, and already you claim it is absolute? How naive.
Aeokirr said:
You cant QED an assumption. you QED a proof. When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.
Yeah, exactly, and you can't "prove" science, you can only build best-fit approximations. (When you assume otherwise makes you irrelevant to productive scientific discourse.) I use QED sardonically because the only things that can actually be proved with certainty are mathematics and deductive logic (which is really just mathematics.)
