At every point in our quest to understand the world and universe — the one around us and the one within us — we can only start based on what we know and can imagine at present. We are biased by what we know and what we’re ignorant of, and we’re also influenced by the range of experiences that we’re aware of. Nobody has access to the full suite of evidence that all of humanity has ever collected, and even that full suite of evidence doesn’t shed light on all that exists and is possible within our Universe.
Our knowledge is limited, and our theories that we’ve devised to explain, predict, and model reality are limited in numerous ways as well. Even the very best of our best theories and idea are far from complete, and in many instances, there are very popular, well-respected ideas in a variety of fields that are deeply flawed at best. So what can we do, and what should we do, when a respected theory runs up against a truth we’ve uncovered from our own lived experience?
That’s what Onahmic Acharjya wants to know, asking: “What do you do when a respected theory is false? Either I deny the validity of deeply respected scientific positions, or I deny the validity of my own immediate subjective experiences, and neither of those seem particularly good.” For all of us, it’s important to remember that our own experiences and knowledge are limited. What any individual knows can never reflect the full, cumulative body of knowledge that the billions and billions of us all possess within us, much less an objective understanding of all of reality that goes beyond what humanity currently comprehends.
It’s vital to be humble before our own ignorance, and so with that said, here’s what it might be helpful to keep in mind. Different frames of reference, including different positions and motions, would see different laws of physics (and would disagree on reality) if a theory is not relativistically invariant. The fact that we have a symmetry under ‘boosts,’ or velocity transformations, tells us we have a conserved quantity: linear momentum.
The fact that a theory is invariant under any sort of coordinate or velocity transformation is known as Lorentz invariance, and any Lorentz invariant symmetry conserves CPT symmetry. This notion of invariance under constant motion dates all the way back to the time of Galileo. It’s important to start with the places where our confidence in our theories is the strongest: in the simplest scientific cases of all.
Although we often speak about physics as being the most difficult or the most advanced of the sciences, the truth is that it’s actually the simplest of the sciences: the most fundamental and the one where we can investigate systems with the least amount of complexity. The reason we’ve been able to make so much progress in physics is because of this simplicity, and the fact that we were able to uncover an extremely powerful, useful, and valid set of models of reality all the way back in the 1600s. Astronomy and physics, in many ways, were the first sciences.
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