/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9950759
Conversely...

>>9718779
In a sense.
"One man's magic is another man's engineering" (Heinlein)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (Clarke)
Lampshaded in the illustration. :)

>>9660263
If you can't falsify it, you can't prove you're right or wrong. If the universe does things "just cuz" to such a degree you can't even predict probability, yer kinda boned. Science isn't just about "truth", it's about verifiable truth. Unverifiable truth belongs in the realm of religion or philosophy.

Not that unverifiable truths aren't fundamentally important. I mean science can't hardly touch some of the most fundamental human experiences - such consciousness, due to the near total inability to examine it empirically. Until someone finds some way to examine such things empirically, they fall outside its privy. The god of gaps keeps shrinking, but there are some gaps that may yet remain forever unfilled by this discipline alone. Nonetheless, for science to work, you must separate what you can know from what you cannot.

>>9250704

>>9182937
>singularity
More or less agreed, though there will probably be another discovery cascade.

>self aware AI
Brain simulations are more or less inevitable.

>time travel
I'm doing it right now! (Okay, fine.)

>FTL travel
Probably not.

>hoverboards
Practical cheap and popular ones? No, but we already have the other variety.

>quantum tunneling
This is a thing. How do you think the sun works?

>EM Drive
Meh.

>quantum computers
Already a thing.

>immortality
Hopefully not. Longevity, certainly.

>simulating an entire universe
Well, that would rather depend on the stage and size of said universe, and how complex the rules are. I mean, we have Minecraft.

>CRISPR
This is also already a thing.

>>8473878
It doesn't - it's a statement taken out of context and used to make it sound more magic than it is. It's simply that one cannot measure a particle's position without collapsing the wave, as there's no more fundamental particle with which you can measure with.

All these measurements are made by machines, not men, after all, and all particle interactions require the collapse of a wave - it's not as if every corner of the universe is constantly under observation, yet clearly, particle interaction that we've not previously observed had been going on.

Plus, it's not really a thing anymore:
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-particle.html
With a little trickery, you can see both states at the same time.