@lukeburgis I think self-driving cars are a good microcosm here. Given enough time, edge cases with real harm to people are inevitable. What is the acceptable risk? Should we accept technology with the same risk as the average human? Should we require some x% safer?
In a different timeline, physicists discover that water is made of particles after a singularity in Navier–Stokes leads them to question the continuum hypothesis.
What if the Navier-Stokes breakthrough just accidentally proved we’re not living in base-level reality?
Think about what it’s saying…
We have equations that describe how fluids behave incredibly well…until you push them far enough.
Then something bizarre happens.
The equations can create a vortex that gets smaller and smaller while its velocity approaches infinity.
Reality basically throws an error…
But obviously nothing in physical reality is actually moving infinitely fast.
So what does the infinity represent?
Maybe we’ve hit the resolution limit of the layer we’re observing…
Like a video game.
From inside the game, everything looks continuous. But zoom in far enough and eventually you hit the limits of the engine rendering it.
Physics keeps doing this.
Black holes…singularity.
Big Bang…singularity.
Now even fluid dynamics…singularity.
Maybe infinity isn’t something that exists in nature.
Maybe infinity is what the math spits out when we try to look beyond the resolution of our layer of reality.
In other words…
Maybe a singularity isn’t where reality breaks.
Maybe it’s where the simulation stops rendering.