Lost Causes of Theoretical Physics (2003)

That seems needlessly judgmental.

...and innocent bystanders posing reasonable what-if questions...

They’re rarely reasonable. You get a lot of questions which are philosophical in nature, but which people believe are scientific. “What is time like for a photon?” “What was there before the Big Bang?” “What is spacetime expanding into?” “What’s inside of the event horizon of a black hole?” “Why are the physical constants what they are?”

When you give the scientific answer, “Bad question, like asking what’s North of The North Pole?” People are unhappy. Plus you’re a dick, because you can figure out what they’re asking and try to give a complete and accessible answer, complete with warnings as to the philosophical/metaphysical nature of both question and answer.

...that really can't be answered with (present) empirical knowledge.

Often the questions themselves are essentially unanswerable in principle. It’s not easy to ask good, relevant, scientific questions about QM or STR/GTR. The lack of knowledge is more of a factor when the questions are insightful.

Like politics, the content of what is said is dominated by the dynamics of the discussion, with English skills "winning" arguments more often than anything else.

Depends on the audience... try that in a rigorous environment and be crucified, but on HN the rigor is absent. It’s a good thing too, because it’s Hacker News, not PhysicsForums.

Physics is already approximate; experiments don't have access to infinity significant figures. If you'd prefer a more complicated example then ask anyone who has ever calculated a QED problem to less than infinity terms.

And? You seem to be complaining that on a site full of non-physicists, people don’t act like physicists. Besides, ontologies of QM are philosophical, not scientific, and hardly limited to laypeople.

If the Born rule were found to be violated, it would invalidate Copenhagen but not MWI, which IMO means Copenhagen is more falsifiable.

There's a practical takeaway from my statement - that physics explanations should always be taken with lots of salt (even ones written by physicists, who are prone to throwing out the star baby with the mathwater.) Judgmental, maybe, but not needlessly.

>They’re rarely reasonable.

They're reasonable because they have an answer: it's the one you suggested. People would accept your "north of the north pole" response in a universe where there was no false but well-written alternative. The problem is, outside of very limited audiences and forums mixtures of misunderstood philosophy and science are a lot easier to come by than the truth. (This extends to science journalism, and even to the rare bad press release.)

By the way, if you want to tell people that they're asking the wrong question in a way that keeps them happy, try responding with the knowledge that would make them realize their question was misguided. For example, whenever anything involving moving at the speed of light comes up, my go-to responses are:

- Discussing hyperbolic geometry until it's clear that what looked like a question about pi/4 was actually a question about infinity.

- Mention that most of the equations have a singularity there, and then give some more down-to-earth examples of equations that have singularities.

- Say that we've never seen it happen, and as a result the physics we write down doesn't include it. (This is sometimes the best answer, even though it's the least satisfying to give or hear. If science fiction effect X happened, we'd have to account for it, no matter how badly it would break everything.)

>And?

Physics is all about approximations with known error bounds. (That is, X plus or minus Y, and the equivalent of that but with equations instead of numbers.) That's what's going on at the boundary between physics and metaphysics, and it's the ultimate answer to most "unanswerable" questions.

If that's a possibility (I can't say, I'm not a physicist) then I'd be a mistake to discard it on the basis that it's just not predictive now.