BlackHumor comments on The Futility of Emergence - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 August 2007 10:10PM

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Comment author: BlackHumor 17 October 2010 10:39:35PM 1 point [-]

"(anyone here know what possible cosmological consequences "Dark Energy" or "Dark Matter" have)"

Ok, this is the point where I started to question your logic (incidentally, apology for the tangent).

I agree that Dark Matter and Dark Energy feel like epicycles and phlogiston. HOWEVER, they also feel like that or felt like that at one point to all actual physicists.

Therefore, if you claim that they do not exist, you must both know what the standard answer to that question is (for if there is no standard answer science would have abandoned those concepts long ago), and also why it is wrong, or in short you must know more about physics than every physicist on earth.

That is not quite so hard to do as it seems on first glance; Einstein did it. Maxwell did it. Planck did it. But it is important to realize that the chance that every scientist on Earth is wrong about thing X is significantly greater than the chance you just don't understand thing X.