This may very well be the case. But how to figure out the rest of the quantum mechanics and the relativity? Universe expanding and the big bang, what happened during the first second? Black holes, dark matter, dark energy? Your OP talked about all of physics.

By all means, you could see if the classical physics model you figure out the first minute holds, and make sense of the discrepancies you find the rest of the day and the coming night. But what could be a good way forward for finding out if there is anything more, for example what we call QM and GR?

(This post is multiply edited as i add more data that come to mind so it may appear reposted over the day at different times)


I didn't give exact examples because i thought many can find on their own as a challenge. So why spoil it thinking you will get it in principle. So if anyone wants to think it more don't read this.

Lets say we can see them in northern lights for example. We can see them in the thunderstorm or a spark. You can see them in mutations over time near say radioactive sources.

Here is a cloud chamber that in principle doesn't require substantial technology



and so it could conceivably be observed in nature under specifically lucky settings.


In principle you do not need dry ice only very cold ice (says -70C here but i bet you can modify gradually things and geometries until it happens or have the experiment done in very hostile environment) and then a warm environment nearby so a combination of things.



Now imagine taking all kinds of sources near that and seeing all the resulting paths and having the ability to reconstruct mathematically what you see in real time. I am confident you can see charge quantization and their masses over time. Start using natural magnets now etc.


You then have photoelectric effect or black body radiation. You have diffraction . You have the analysis of light through prisms and diffraction gratings to reveal quantization of energies/transitions. None of these require very advanced technology and rely on senses to be observed.







None of these is very advanced technology that is not in principle available many centuries ago and some of it may be beneficiaries of coincidences when observing other things.

But they do require to get lucky to observe such rare things or to be motivated to modify environment to get there hence it is not going to be done only through intelligence but also as a result of natural environmental luck that has a different pace not entirely affected (in the bottleneck part) by intelligence but enhanced by it. This is why i say that over time it is possible but it wont be trivially easy moreover the intelligence.

The above lectures can in principle be recreated by a very advanced intelligence after watching light in many different situations for a long time.




(A biofilm on the surface of a fishtank produces diffraction grating effects when the bacteria are all evenly sized and spaced)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating


The blue color of the sky or the beautiful properties of sunsets or the rainbows can reveal a lot too (you can even detect volcanic eruptions from them) ;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mie_scattering


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow


Indeed a superintelligence over time can recover a lot from basic observations like these and be charmed in more ways than we do;







Macroscopic type observations "easily" take you to Avogadro's number also;

https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0504201.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant

Once you start forming theories with elementary particles based on all these things you can start seeing more that eventually can even lead to weak interactions why not by combining many of the above together and relying only on your senses and primitive technology. The age of the sun (obviously older than earth's age which can be determined roughly with elementary means too) is affected by what kind of reactions are in place in it and eventually this goes to standard model properties. Decay time (radioactivity) is affected etc.

There is even the relative abundance of isotopes/elements on earth that reveal supernova theory properties hence particle physics. Basically you can look at the ratio of different isotopes today and deduce from it the age of the material that created earth and the solar system. But this is not all. You can use that initial ratio formed at the supernova explosion say 6.5 bil years ago to probe even properties of neutrinos that affect these numbers in various models.

So basically without seeing a supernova you can see the results of the explosion in earth's crust properties that is imprinted on macroscopically identifiable things like the relative ratio of isotopes today. This is basically what i mean by saying there is a connection in so many different levels macroscopically that a very advanced intelligence will be playing all the connections in 100 levels all around us to fit things a lot faster even without the proper accuracy through super advanced technology. Too much data to fit together can recover the accuracy differently.

You can deduce cosmological properties by the fact the sky is dark at night also (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox). A lot of the properties can be found by putting restrictions on everyday things that appear one way and would be radically different with some other constants or mechanisms. Like you can eventually see that cosmic radiation on earth is below a certain level (compare it with the environment near a source say) and this will put limits to how big the galaxy (and the astrophysical sources of the radiation) really is. You know the proton if it decays has an age much larger than eg 10^25 sec or whatever even by the mere fact we are not experiencing more radiation all around us etc.

You can develop/verify special relativity by measuring the relative abundance of muons in different heights (take the chamber in different altitudes) and measure their decay constant that way too. That decay constant can tell you a lot now in terms of particle physics.


You can recover GR on first principles like Einstein did once you have SR and Newtonian gravity and principle of equivalence without being able yet to verify it without some significant technology though. But the existence of these theories may have ramifications at cosmological level that eventually is reflected in some basic observation not requiring telescopes (i will need to revisit this later maybe).

GR and QM eventually affect how large a star that gives supernova is. The relative brightness of stars can reveal things about how the population is distributed among various types of stars in our neighborhood. Various statistical models can then be used to see what is eliminated by how the stars look at night and guess their distances and other properties. I know it looks funny but its possible simply by looking (with human eye accuracy) at their relative magnitudes if you can do some serious data analysis. You can compare with the light from planets, moon, sun, etc. You have 5000 stars/objects to work with lol. Something can be found. You can see milky way (the basic plane) with your eyes in a clear night. You can observe the relative brightness of Venus or Mars during the year and deduce things about their orbits without a telescope (phases too on Venus but not on Mars). You can recover how far Jupiter is too. Occasional stars that correspond to supernova explosions and their duration can tell certain things too. They can reveal the existence of other galaxies!


Mostly i am arguing you can rely on your senses to observe indirectly a lot of things that have macroscopic consequences but require a microscopic or large scale cosmological theory to explain the variety of all the phenomena experienced together. So microscopic properties and large scale cosmological effects survive in macroscopic everyday effects/observations/consequences accessible to our senses and you have so many of them that they severely restrict the underlying theories eventually.

Like an intelligence with limited physical manipulation ability which uses human sense and reason like tools to explore physics using it's imagination.

And the data collector (the eyes) are complete crap.

These eyes would have you believe that "red" is an actual color. You (the super-intelligent beings) are starting from really ****ty data and you've no way of even determining that it is really ****ty data.

Yeah, everything that turned out to be untrue is completely idiotic. We know this because we discovered that it was untrue.

And yet you, with your feeble mind, believe that you know what would happen if my visual system (I have 20/20 vision) understands how something exponentially more intelligence than me had my visual system and some feet for doing the walking (I have a bum knee) would discover all of modern physics.

This seems a bit silly of you, don't you think?

It wasn't needlessly complex. It flows mathematically. As a small aside, Ockham's Razor (I assume that this is your incorrect complaint about it being complex) is what us dumb humans have to rely on since we aren't smart enough to avoid using weak heuristics.

And you are going to assume that symmetry is universal? Clearly it is not. Even a moron knows that assumption is unwarranted from the information your eyes take in. Go look at a mountain for a minute or two. Find the symmetry.

I'm not the one making the strong claim. You've demonstrated that I cannot prove a negative so far, but I conceded that point a few decades ago.

So far, we have from you: I posit, I posit, I posit.

That is how good experimentation is, you would have said, had you thought about it a bit more. It corrects internally consistent logical/mathematical models by bringing in new data that must be explained. This is how even somewhat intelligent beings figured things out.

"Ah, well if x is true, then z follows as a consequence and if z is untrue then it disfavors the truth of x. Too bad I have been forbidden by the author of this thread to build a particle accelerator. Oh well, might as well go get a drink while thinking of the 489,324,987 quite reasonable internally consistent and consistent with what my eyes tell me theories I have now created."

Like the aether. Got you. Seems that you are, like all humans, lacking the intelligence and flexibility necessary to imagine what it is like to not already have the data that told you the answer.

Nope. It is just the process of creating and eliminating competing theories based on experimentation.

Yes, I am pretty sure we are all thinking like a human intelligence. You yourself get at least a "yeah, probably" on the Turing Test in this thread.

Thank you for sharing what you believe. I certainly believe that it is likely that you believe it. I'm entirely uncertain why you felt the need to share your belief with me. Is it an attempt to bond with me? Like the nice people who want to tell me about their Lord?

No. They are not. I'm going to assume that the rest of the thread relies on the false fact that eyes are very very accurate, so feel no need to continue on.

But the human eyes deliver quite a bit of information, if handled correctly:
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye

I don't quite agree. Of course the brilliant ones have speeded things up, especially in eras with limited communication possibilities, nice to have it all in a single brain.

But I claim the following: 10,000 of plaayndes could make up for one Einstein/Newton, and I'm just moderately smart. You would need maybe just 1,000 of masques (sorry masque, don't know if this is nicely said or not...)

Is there any possibility to get a 1:10,000 of a nobel prize?

That is a "wonders of the human eye" piece. Similar to travel brochures, it leaves out the nitty gritty that would be important to a budding physicist who wants to believe his eyes. Please note that the entire bit you cited was 100% determined through experimentation and experimentation is verboten as a priori knowledge in this thread, per the OP.

Experimentation as realized with the scientific method is the efficient way to do it. However passive observation or light experimentation supported by amazingly strong computational power and other qualities can make up for it sometimes and maybe eventually always. You see observation is just another experiment that is not under ideal control.

Instead of having to solve a 3x3 system you have a 15x15 system using 15 different observations so to speak instead of a well designed experiment that uses tools making things simpler. Its ugly but not a problem if you can solve such big systems easily.

Basically all things observed for that super intelligence are a long sequence of dirty experiments. If you can recall everything you ever saw in your life thrown or falling and have good processing capabilities of that data then it is like having done well controlled experiments in inclines/ramps with balls rolling like Galileo did. You will recover the same laws either way.

If you can do all kinds of geometric optics with prisms and rainbows and liquids and have also some isolated clean observation of waves here and there you will arrive at wave optics as a guess and then proven correct over and over and you will eventually recover a lot of optics ie refraction, reflection etc and hints of quantum mechanics too.

I think it is possible to show significant advances over time but i do not share the optimism in speed because as i said it is nature with the pace it is providing the rare phenomena to observe (when you are not actively pursuing them with technological experiments) that controls the actual rate of progress in this game.

Sure enough often it will be able to solve a lot of problems together when critical data is accumulated. It will be seeing the world in a more comprehensive unified (care for all details) way than we do. When you enter a room with strangers you do not instantly remember what all wear and what are their heights and possible weights and what each was doing for 5 seconds. But that intelligence would be able to recall all that and see it as numerous experiments all at once. Same with observing how wind moves the trees in a forest or the clouds move in the sky etc.


All the world is an endless stream of dirty experiments for that observer. Eventually things are so well connected that i believe it is possible to uncover the puzzle that way but it will require immense effort and significant time without constructing tools, even primitive ones. With primitive tools allowed it would be very easy i think to learn a ton of things real fast and then the finer things gradually.

Basically let me argue that as humans we have the answers before us well in advance of actually making the experiments with what we already know if we were able to pay closer attention to many details and process fast many alternatives as well as realize how things from different areas combine together in complex systems. It is because we are not good at that that we need even more elaborate and careful experiments than just endless stream of observations. But the answers exist also in the observations because after all, the entire universe is an endless experiment.

The entirety of the scientific method is experimentation.

Einstein didnt do any experiments to find General Relativity for you. Gedanken ones do not count as the kind of experiments you imagine.


What kind of experiment do you propose i do to find the size and distances of the moon/sun etc? I can do just fine with observations there too during eclipses. You cannot order more eclipses as an experiment , you have to collect data from all of them over time and get the picture decoding what they tell you. The fact is if you can analyze all the planets and study their orbits it becomes possible to recover 1/r^2 law because it leads to elliptical orbits and their periods. So the law of gravitation by Newton can come out of Kepler's laws.

The point is it is a combination of experiments, observations and theoretical synthesis from first principles. Yes of course in the end the experiment and new observation will enhance the faith in the theory or undermine it. But in principle observations and synthesis with mathematics from first principles that you have recovered from earlier observations can take you the distance also with some pace in the absence of clean methodical experiments. It is not a good idea for humans but it may be possible for a system that can analyze observations in a more thorough manner because then all the world becomes observations and data for that system 24/7. It is not the same for us. We need it to be more organized and limited/controlled and we dont operate that way 24/7. Obviously the higher intelligence can also benefit from experimentation vs observation and have both instead of just observations. This is why even if it doesn't have natural dexterity it will try to create it (and technology) using its intelligence. Because dexterity leads to control and better experiments.

Basically what we use as experiments to confirm or deny a theory the higher intelligence will do with new observations or revisiting of old observations.

Masque, amazing large post earlier. That what was what I was looking for - wonderful to have access to your brain to answer this question. Thanks a ton.

Experimentation is ultimately just data fitting, and as masque has shown, the world contains a lot of data. A good fitter with a high intelligence has access to the results billions of experiments just by looking at the world with human eyes. I'm really quite surprised at how rigid your thinking is here.

I think I just smelled a neutrino going by.

Neutrinos were predicted by feeble human minds in 1931, and weren't discovered in reality until decades later.

You can deduce and even prove the existence of particles that must exist for other aspects of the universe to be the way the are.

It was predicted to explain data from beta decay experiments, not to explain anything about the universe at large.

Humans have discovered all of known physics using only human senses, so the answer is obviously "yes."

Making up theories is easy. Virtually all are completely wrong. A few gems can be turned into useful models that stick around.

You need experimentation to differentiate the junk from the gems.

I go with op and masque here. If you are good observer you can find out what is junk anyway, it just doesn't fit in.

We can't, because of our limited capacity. We miss things, and need to experiment. It's not axiomatic, just a practical necessity.

I'd go a step further and say alot of the ones falsified by experiment aren't even junk. They match up perfectly with everything we've observed but make 1 extra prediction that you can only test by looking for, like with many GUTs which easily could have been true.

So it's your position that the macro world would look identical at a human-eye scale even with different underlying physical laws?

I think that's pretty much a fact at this point, or physics is so different from how we currently understand it that there is no point in even discussing it.

What is it that makes it a fact?

I mean, once upon a time the world we'd observed was pretty much explainable by classical, with a few anomalies/loose ends (and there are many anomalies/loose ends right now, too).

80 years later, we know that it's dead obvious the macro world is ruled by quantum, and in fact couldn't be any other way; much of the world around us requires quantum to be like it is. We just lacked the intelligence and keen observation and/or the logical clarity needed to see it.

So while two models (Higgs boson vs not Higgs boson?) can seem identical apart from minor details, I think that's just the particular point at the coalface that we happen to be chipping away at. It seems sharply defined, isolated, and irrelevant to what's behind us, because of where are with our understanding right now, but I think history shows that's not the case at all. Hindsight shows a vast number of clues we would have picked up if we were smarter; as well as sometimes logical ways in which we would have realized that what we've since found is indeed the only possible solution.

I addressed that earlier....if you just want to say that everything will be obvious, ok, but that isn't a very interesting conversation. It seems inconceivable to me that somebody could look at classical physics, where P symmetry is exact, and figure out that the weak interaction only couples to left handed particles. The notion that it is actually obvious that the universe couldn't have chosen right handedness is just such a leap compared to the difference between classical and first or even second quantization.

Parity violation in weak interactions can have macroscopic consequences in supernova

https://arxiv.org/pdf/nucl-th/0410074.pdf

eg

"Core collapse supernovae are gigantic explosions of massive stars that radiate 99% of their energy in neutrinos. This provides a unique opportunity for large scale parity or charge conjugation violation. Parity violation in a strong magnetic field could lead to an asymmetry in the neutrino radiation and recoil of the newly formed neutron star. Charge conjugation violation in the neutrino-nucleon interaction reduces the ratio of neutrons to protons in the neutrino driven wind above the neutron star. This is a problem for r-process nucleosynthesis in this wind. On earth, parity violation is an excellent probe of neutrons because the weak charge of a neutron is much larger than that of a proton. The Parity Radius Experiment (PREX) at Jefferson Laboratory aims to precisely measure the neutron radius of 208Pb with parity violating elastic electron scattering. This has many implications for astrophysics, including the structure of neutron stars, and for atomic parity nonconservation experiments"

https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9705126.pdf


So it can be detected eventually from macroscopic consequences that would be different without it.

I am not suggesting any of this is easy, only that it is in principle there waiting for us to get complex enough to notice these things still at macroscopic levels.

You build all possible models and only the left handed ones survive eventually certain large scale tests.

"Believing ones eyes" is much about believing a for that purpose faulty brain. We overcome that with experimentation.

The raw capacity of the eyes to transfer information will be a key element for our entity if he's to figure out how the world works in a day.

Our eyes have a capacity of about 500 megapixels according to

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/i...9061116AAQQWoc

Let's say you can register up to ten different pictures a second. So you have 5 gigapixels a second. In an hour it's 20 terapixels, and in a day 500 terapixels. Give him a year and it's 200 petapixels. What can you achieve if using that information content smartly? Remember the entity tries to focus optimally as he goes.