Comment on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015

Mon, 11 May 2015 19:26:15 GMT

Depends on how you decide what truth is, and what qualifies it to be "unearthed."

But for one universe in which some truth, for some value of truth, can be unearthed, for some value of unearthed, while other truth can't be:

Imagine a universe in which 12.879% (exactly) of all matter is a unique kind of matter that shares no qualities in common with any other matter, and is almost entirely nonreactive with all other kinds of matter, and was created by a process not shared in common with any other matter, which had no effect whatsoever on any other matter. Any truths about this matter, including its existence and the percentage of the universe composed of it, would be completely non-observational. The only reaction this matter has with any other matter is when it is in a specific configuration which requires extremely high levels of the local equivalent of negative entropy, at which point it emits a single electromagnetic pulse. This was used once by an intelligence species composed of this unique matter who then went on to die in massive wars, to encode in a series of flashes of light every detail they knew about physics, and was observed by one human-equivalent monk ascetic, who used a language similar to morse code to write down the sequence of pulses, which he described as a holy vision. Centuries later, these pulses were translated into mathematical equations which described the unique physics of this concurrent universe of exotic matter, but no mechanism of proving the existence or nonexistence of this exotic matter, save that the equations are far beyond the mathematics of anyone alive at the time the signal was encoded, and it has become a controversial matter whether or not it was an elaborate hoax by a genius.

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