logoalt Hacker News

soon_to_be_sb • today at 2:52 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

>Any good scientific theory must create falsifiable hypotheses.

For any behavior inside the world, this is good.

But for the world itself and what harbor's it, asking for falsifiability is like measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space.

Even science, that works in terms of cause and affect, which implies space and time, cannot be used to describe space and time itself.

Vanilla "scientists" have been trying to do that, but that is a dead end.


Replies

aleph_minus_one • today at 3:13 PM

> But for the world itself and what harbor's it, asking for falsifiability is like measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space.

Which exactly is what general relativity is centrally about and the reason why general relativity is defined in terms of intrinsic properties of the Einstein manifold describing the space of the universe. Intrinsic properties are, colloquially, indeed properties that can be measured "using a ruler that inhabits the same space".

Gauß' Theorema Egregium [1] is an early predecessor of intrinsic properties of general manifolds, and says that the curvature of a surface can indeed be "be determined entirely by measuring angles, distances and their rates of change on a surface, without reference to the particular manner in which the surface is embedded in the ambient 3-dimensional Euclidean space" ([1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Theorema_Egregium...

➕ show 1 reply
zmgsabst • today at 3:20 PM

> measuring the expansion of space using a ruler that inhabits the same space

We do that, routinely: that’s how we do cosmology.

➕ show 1 reply