Pump the brakes.
You seem to be backpedaling. First you posted this.
I'm not backpedaling at all; I think you're confused as to what it means to
know something.
We know the universe. This doesn't mean we know
everything, and I said earlier we don't - but we are well on our way to understanding how the universe operates in a complete model.
At present though, we know a great deal about the universe, and I was specifically referring to the unification of quantum mechanics and classical physics as well as the completion of the Standard Model.
Again, I think you have said "nothing is known" to which I objected and said that's false, we know the universe and how it works. We understand the fundamental forces of the universe in extreme detail. We understand gravitation on large and small scales, just not in between. Not
yet.
Yes, science is advancing, but science isn't fundamentally changing from the ground-up; which is what you're suggesting by saying we don't know anything and everything is fluid. This is completely false, and an incorrect narrative about scientific understanding.
Now you're saying the word believe and might a lot.
Believe as in, we can predict with a level of certainty. Believe as in we have specific theories regarding the question you posed about water masers, but we are still compiling observational evidence to strengthen those predictions and narrow our understanding of the specific phenomena.
Funny I thought I made that point about blind faith in scientific theories.
Where is there blind faith in anything I've said? This is false.
Science is not faith-based. We observe these phenomena and then make testable, falsifiable predictions about the emergence of said phenomena within the framework of already tested and proven science.
I think you misunderstand science, at a fundamental level, and don't really understand the scientific method or how we come about proving specific testable theories that make predictions about the universe.
Do you know the universe or do you believe you know it?
This is like asking someone do they know their wife, or do they believe they know her.
We know the universe, and we have increased that knowledge since the dawn of thinking man.
With that said the mechanisms of the universe, the inner workings of our physical reality are governed by a finite set of deterministic causal interactions that can be defined by a finite model of laws.
Knowing this axiom to be true means that we are rapidly approaching a point in which we will have a complete understanding of the universe. Whether that happens in our lifetime or not, I cannot say; however, we are close. Don't take my word for it, Leonard Susskind recently commented that humanity was on the verge of completing a theory of everything with the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
As I said, there is some very amazing work on this front that is defining, for the first time, the nature of spacetime itself. With such a theory, we would have a complete, dimensionally-representative, understanding of quantum gravity at all scales. We would have the framework for a unification theory.
You saying we know it is laughable.
???
When we're flying across the universe in spaceships we'll be at the point of learning it.
You know we do have a space program right? We can go to our neighboring planets if we
choose. Unfortunately, we choose not to. You should also know that we are able to reach other stars if we decided to make the
extreme investment. We choose not to do this because our thinking is framed within the spans of human lifetimes.
So the question isn't
can we reach another planet, which is obviously within our technological grasp; nor is the question can we reach another star, which is at the limit of our technology and would take an extraordinary amount of time.
The question is, can we do it in a single human lifetime? Or more importantly to most, can we do it and come back in a reasonable amount of time (i.e., faster than light).
The answer to that might be no, for any civilization, anywhere in this universe due to the limitations imposed upon us by relativity.
The point of the argument though is that we can even ask this question because one-hundred years ago, Albert Einstein defined the two theories of relativity. Einstein did this, a model of the universe, without ever leaving the planet.
To say we know it from our position now, is equivalent to someone on an island in the Pacific that hasn't had contact with the outside world, saying they know the world.
You realize that a person on an island in the Pacific Ocean could tell you how big the Earth is, what it's curvature is, derive the fundamental forces of the universe, discover a consistent theory of gravitation, build a V2 rocket to reach into space; etc etc, all without ever leaving said island?
If you want to make a scientific argument, I'm all for it, but right now it seems you're making a philosophical argument and I'm having a hard time following it because I think the premise - that we have extremely limited, or really nonexistent knowledge - about the inner workings of the universe, is simply false.
We do not need to traverse the universe in order to understand it; it's all around us.
You realize we discovered black holes without ever leaving the Earth right?
