Category Archives: science

Why Socrates was an idiot

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Socrates supposedly used a triple-sieve technique to filter out signal from noise in his life. If something was true, good and useful, then it got a pass. If not, he wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Sounds reasonable, right? Let’s see how we would have fared if the most important things in history were subjected to his filter.

Someone breaks off a sharp sliver of rock and figures out you can cut stuff with it. But is it true? I don’t know. It just is. Is it good? I don’t know, it just is, ethical criteria don’t apply. Is it useful? Yes, but it’s also possibly dangerous because you can cut yourself with it or kill people. Fail.

Someone accidentally drills a hole in wood too forcefully and produces a fire. Wow, fire! But is it true? Well, it just is. Is it good? I don’t know, I guess you can either cook a meal with it or burn your house down, so it depends. Is it useful? Yeah, it’s useful. It’s also possibly harmful, so sorry, fail.

Someone invented the wheel and made a cart that can transport goods more efficiently to bigger distances. But is it true? Sort of. Is it good? How can we tell what will come of it eventually? Maybe people will use it to make chariots of war and kill people. Is it useful? Well, we don’t know, we haven’t tried it out yet. Fail.

And that’s why the Greeks poisoned the motherfucker, because if people used his kind of philosophy to decide about things, they’d still be eating bananas on trees. Maybe people then intuitively understood the peril of asking too many questions.

In order to make any kind of progress, you need to work exactly with things that haven’t yet been proven true, good or useful. You must be ready to test ideas that sound crazy, like the one that the Earth isn’t flat and that the Sun doesn’t actually move in the sky from east to west every day, but that the Earth actually revolves around its axis, or that men could possibly fly faster than the birds or dive deeper than the fish. You need to work with things that are morally ambivalent and can be used for both good or ill, because good or ill is not in things but in the mind of the user. You need to be ready to do useless things because you never know what you could stumble into. You might find mold spoiling samples in your Petri dish, you might throw plates around the cafeteria and see how they fall and discover quantum electrodynamics and win Nobel prize. You can’t know what you’ll end up with just based on what it sounds to your pompous quasi-intellectual arrogance.

You need to give things a chance to show themselves, to tell you what they are. You can’t just silence everything based on what you think you know about truth, goodness and usefulness. Socrates was a pompous ass who didn’t even realize how incredibly harmful and wrong his “philosophy” was. If cavemen questioned things the way he deemed appropriate, they would no longer be living in caves, they’d go back to living on trees. Fortunately, they tested things by practical application and experiment and not skepticism, and so here we are.

The dark energy problem

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While trying to wake up properly this morning I had an idea that I think might work towards solving the “dark energy” problem.

The summary: curvature of the empty-space manifold is negative.

Explanation: I personally subscribe to Einstein’s and Feynman’s explanation of gravity as a property of mass which curves space. It cannot be propagated by some kind of particle, among other things because the black holes would close themselves off at the event horizon. Gravity is simply a geometric property – as Feynman said, it wouldn’t confuse us if we used a different coordinate system. So, what gravity does is create a positive distortion of the spatial manifold. The simplest explanation as to why the Universe accelerates in its expansion is that empty space curvature is not zero, but a slight negative value. Even a small amount of mass is sufficient to cancel out this curvature, but in intergalactic space, the curvature of space becomes negative, which explains the structure of the Universe which seems to consist of “filaments” of galaxies that cluster together and then you have vast areas of empty space. This is consistent with my thesis because that’s exactly how the Universe would behave if empty space had a slight negative curvature.

As a disclaimer, I didn’t look all that much into physics recently so it’s quite possible that someone else solved the problem in the meantime, but I, at least, feel better having this explanation because the dark energy problem was a slight mental itch I couldn’t scratch.