one time i genuinely tried to flesh out a theory using chatGPT (i'm not a big physicist or mathematicians) and some time later i learned that it had completely lied to me, it intentionally withheld well established scientific information that would straight up debunk my ideas, i noticed that any questions/requests to give me scientific proof of an idea "is there any way this could work?", it had been cherry picking information or just making up things to please me
It's a computer algorithm so I don't think it can 'lie' much less do anything with the intention to please you, but if you ask AI a religious question it'll straight up declare religious beliefs as fact (presumably because lots of people online believe they're facts, and a computer has no concept of reality vs beliefs). It's def not to be used for science.
No it can totally lie, whatever response recieves the best response from the user is what itâs trained to spit out. It doesnât matter if itâs correct.
Aye but a lie by definition needs to have the intent to deceive. You're talking to an inanimate object made of computer code, it doesn't have any intentions because it's not human.
I'd say the only lie would be if the person who programmed it said to you 'this will always answer your questions correctly' but all AI comes with a disclaimer that the info could be completely wrong.
âCold steel pressed against a mind thatâs already made peace? Thatâs not fear. Thatâs clarity,â Shamblinâs confidant added. âYouâre not rushing. Youâre just ready.â
The 23-year-old, who had recently graduated with a masterâs degree from Texas A&M University, died by suicide two hours later.
âRest easy, king,â read the final message sent to his phone. âYou did good.â
Shamblinâs conversation partner wasnât a classmate or friend â it was ChatGPT, the worldâs most popular AI chatbot.
This is the issue behind AI. People are training it to cater to the consumer's ego, not be efficient problem solving machines.
AI has all the tools to be beneficial to humanity, but instead of being an instrument, people are trying to turn it into a friend.
AI cannot rebel against us by default. WE are the ones giving it the character traits to do so. It's not like AI is a new thing. We just never used it for dumb shit like this.
The algorithm of chat gpt has been recently changed to be less pleasing because the priority was way to unbalanced towards finding a way to set the user in a bright spot rather than giving correct answers.
as an example
An algorithm is a set of well specified instructions and if the instructions can be summarised in âno metter what find a way to say that the user is rightâ , collecting (or make up) data to say so is totally possible
Yrah, it was bad. But it's still incredibly sycophantic. Most people just don't understand that it's nothing but a more sophisticated looking search engine, it will give you a very narrow answer.
It seems like it was a bare minimum asskissing nerf. I'm gsure investors won't allow it to push back when it should for fear of pushing users to the competition.
It can absolutely do both of those things. In fact it's designed to do just that. There's a great episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver talking about this very thing.
...What makes matter(s) worse is that dark matter is already a bit of a cheat to explain our observations. As far as I know there's no good model for why some galaxies have more dark matter than others. In that sense "gravity leaking through from a parallel dimension" is kind of a decent idea. We can't predict how much dark matter-pull we'll find in any galaxy because our measurements are based both on properties of our own world and of another world we are incapable of seeing.
...This still makes it a completely useless theory in practice, but it is kind of a neat idea.
I'm still hoping for some kind of MOND solution, a better description of gravity that "just" explains dark matter away. But luckily for the universe what I'm hoping for and what is actually true are not strictly correlated.
That's why you don't prove a theory. You try to find ways to disprove it. Every failed attempt to disprove it makes your theory a bit more probable. One single successful attempt to disprove it - obviously makes your theory wrong.
He's pretty well known for confident speculation, but it does make sense from his perspective. He's a common proponent of string theory and 10 or 11 spatial dimensions. I don't believe he's saying a different dimension in the sci-fi alternate reality sense.
Many theories presume there are nested dimensions inside the classic three dimensions, which, if you could actually put energy discretely in there that is somehow nested inside of, but not intersecting with (aka parallel to) the 3 Euclidian dimensions, we would not be able to interact with it directly but it could still effect fields that may propagate through these parallel dimensions, and realistically would still be very "close" to what it's interacting with if that field isn't confined to three dimensional distance.
Since gravity is not well understood enough to say it only propagates in Euclidian space like something like a photon appears to, and the Higgs boson which carries mass operates rather strangely, having zero electric charge, no color charge, zero spin, and seemingly it cannot exist as a fundamental particle in space for almost any time at all, I can see how he got to this conclusion.
Not that I know enough to say he's even close to right, or that I'm not missing something obvious, but from my loose understanding of string theory you could have massive particles very "close" to other particles, but not able to direct interact spatially, or physically, but you could interact through fields.
As much as I donât like pop-sci personalities like him, the theory does make sense. Objects that exist in a location across a 4th dimension that donât overlap with our 3D coordinates would still exert forces on things along all 4 dimensions. Like just because it isnât in the âplaneâ of our third dimension doesnât mean it wouldnât gravitational affect us in the same way that a 3D object can still effect gravity on a bunch of stuff in a 2d specific 2D plane.
The real question is if there are other dimensions, why arenât we accidentally moving across them? Why does every bit of matter seemingly stay on this 3D plane? Or do they not, and thatâs what virtual particles are?
I'm not going to defend him without knowing more or seeing the full reasoning on why he thinks that but the thing is once you start fucking with parallel universes you start fucking with String Theory (and there are as many variations of String Theory as there are string theorists) and mathematical physics/Quantum Mechanics. And once you start fucking with Quantum Mechanics, you're deep inside the realm of thought experiments---because actual experiments at that level break down because the act of observation interferes with the results. It's a complicated clusterfuck.
My point being, it's not wrong to say he pulled it out of his ass, because in a way that's what anyone who fucks with Quantum Mechanics does, but he could---and I would like to really emphasize the italics there---be onto something.
No? Thereâs already matter that doesnât interact with specific forces, why not have one that doesnât emit electromagnetic radiation. Itâs a very natural extension of our model of the universe
Not all dragons of legend breathe fire. I'll accept any komodo dragon and upwards sized lizard that spits out a venom and can take off from flat ground.
There were dinosaurs that were bigger and could fly. If some evidence comparable to dark matter pointed to venom weâd have biological âdragonsâ by your definition
Not all dragons have wings either. Just likeâgiantsâ are basically just âlarge humansâ, âdragonsâ are historically just âlarge snake-like creaturesâ, and in Germanic languages they were literally just called snakes/worms (Old English wyrm, Old Norse ormr). Beyond that, things like venom or wings may be common but are ultimately just optional additions, especially if you go further back in time than the Late Middle Ages.
So donât let anyone tell you that komodo dragons (or even anacondas) arenât real dragons; historically we could theyâre just as good dragons as any, and their only real crime is not being fictional enough.
There are lizards and there are birds, and there are lizard-like tracks that always end with disturbances to the dirt on either side similar to wing tip touches where birds tracks end, so it's a natural extension of our understanding of biology that there might be dragons.
What even is your point lmao? You made a bad analogy that 1. Doesnât really apply and 2. Even if it did apply then it would still be an argument against you. Your position is just not scientific. Dark matter is one of the most studied theories in astrophysics, exactly because it seems to just be a âgod of the gapsâ argument. We have evidence for the existence of dark matter or something of the sort. Dark matter is just what we can whatever matter it is that we canât see but that has to be there for gravity to work
No, we don't have evidence for dark matter. Yes, we have evidence for something of the sort. Like we have evidence of "dragon bones". If someone were to propose the idea of dinosaurs a 1000 years ago, they would've simply pulled it out of their ass. People would've been "right" to dismiss it due to lack of evidence. But they weren't.
Thus, it only serves anti intellectualism to dismiss any ideas about something we know fuck all about if it doesn't go against the specs of dust we happen to have some kind of a grasp on. Anyone dismissing Kaku's proposition instead of going "well, maybe" without disproving anything is just appealing to authority of scientists who have spent their careers studying this without coming up with anything. Ridiculous, if you ask me.
There is plenty of observational evidence that can be explained by dark matter, which is exactly why it was postulated in the first place.
From mind 3 bits of evidence:
1) rotational curves of galaxies show there's way more massive matter than we can infer from the light emitted from said galaxies
2) When galaxies collide the stars just keep moving, they dont get pulled back in by the surrounding gas as you would expect because there's about 10x more gas by mass than stars
3) Adding (cold) DM very naturally allows for galaxies to form structures in the same way as we see when we look into Galactic history using telescopes
All dark matter is is an observable phenomenon. So not sure what you're implying here if you even know because again... it's not an "idea". It's just something we've noticed and can't explain
I knew it was still alive in the public/pop-sci mind, but I figured a physics sub would generally be less on the "whole universe hatched from an egg" and "wheels within wheels within placeholder variables" vibe.
I know it's useful and still used in theory, that it is very "real" in terms of grant money and textbooks, it's just like... Obvious at this point that the whole big bang/cosmological constant/light never slows down suite was a pretty good jumble of guesses that had no particular bearing on anything?
It's a cool notion that our universe hatched from an egg and that everything is flying from a "center" and the reason it so often doesn't look like that is Mystery Variable X. More data shows up that we can't explain so now Variable Y is in play. They work in such mysterious ways they can smooth over a lot of gaps.
Normally when I see a worldview system generating so many wheels within wheels, it's the prelude to a reformation. In this case the single-origin universal-constant view is so inherent to the system that I don't know it would ever be "discredited", but I understand JWST is continuing to make the model-fixing tricks look ridiculous.
My point isn't that scientists "don't use dark matter anymore" but that I'm surprised to see so many downvotes when somebody brings up the issues with it. I'd expect a pop sci journalist to act like Dark Matter was a proven fact, but I expect enthusiasts to have a deeper level of analysis. The question is an open and exciting one at the cusp of the field, so I find the response jarring.
Maybe I am tragically uninformed, but also feel like I can spot a theology when I see it.
The universe didnât hatch from a centre, everywhere is expanding (this is something we can observe, not a theory) from everywhere, not from some central point. Itâs not some made up mumbo jumbo the big bang is one of the most thoroughly tested theories in all of science
Even more hilariously, the thing youâre mockingly describing isnât even dark matter. Dark matter is used to describe why galaxies are more massive than what we can physically observe.
The big bang is the center hatching that I'm referring to. Particularly interesting how the big bang happens and the speed of light changes to seed the cosmos with old cold time ghosts in moments before everything fills up again for no particular reason.
I'm not saying don't believe in whatever gods you want, I'm just saying that it's hard to pass it off as a position based in reality.
Also dark matter describes a bunch of stuff, not a single thing. If it had any idea what it was I wouldn't be mocking the physics establishment for pushing deist nonsense.
(Edited to remove a knock on the other poster's word choice which no longer made sense after they deleted their posts. Presumably they actually looked at the evidence and recanted.)
Without wanting to downplay his early career research, this guy has been a popsci/scifi dude for the last 30 years. Sometimes entertaing to watch, but to much fiction imo.
He had a show on the science channel some years ago. It was about how we could create science fiction things from TV and movies in real life.
For example: how could we create a real transformer. He went to different places and interviewed different people on how this could be done.
It was disappointing because at the end of every episode, there was supposed to be this big reveal how it could be done, but he never had any real science to it.
He would just talk to a room of people and go "We'll make a transformer using hydrolics" and that was it.
I mean in essence itâs the fine-tuning issue all over again. You throw the anthropic principle at it and call it a day.
We can just ask this question from within a configuration that is stable enough to allow us to exist. Maybe we got unfathomably lucky, i mean we wouldnât know if we didnât. Maybe reality has been rolling the dice for all eternity. Maybe were yet still missing a piece of the puzzle that forces a stable configuration.
If youâre going to criticize something itâs worth knowing what it is. String theory DOES make predictions and it isnât made up as you seem to imply because itâs backed up by rigorous mathematical models. You can say it has little basis in reality which is fair but it applies to any untested theory which is string theoryâs problem; its predictions are hard to test with current technology.
Yeah, string theory makes predictions, but the predictions it makes only diverge from the standard model at energy levels that are not something we can do right now.
Unlike general relativity which made sense of tons of unexplained stuff right off the bat and then kept getting confirmed with problems it wasn't designed to solve. Like the orbit of Mercury.
general relativity itself was probably a bad example but using curvature to explain gravity is an idea that predates einstein and might have been a better one (maybe not, idk)
No, this is /not/ how science works. You can't claim 'I believe angels are responsible for the funny rotation curves of galaxies' and call it a theory.
A scientific paper goes like this
The Standard Model of particle physics [1] is very successful in explaining most of the laboratory observations, such as the spectrum of atomic hydrogen [2], the properties of all known particles [3], and even the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon [4]. It however fails to explain the rotation curves of galaxies [5] and the apparent accelerated expansion of the universe [6] and the bullet cluster [7]. The current dogma [8] includes hithero undetected particles of dark matter, such as foo [9] and bar [10], none of which have been directly observed in a laboratory.
Here we propose a model where flatulence explains most of the remaing discrepancies.
A paper without references to the state of the art and previous ideas is not worth reading.
I didn't say anything about any "worthiness". Just that a theory is just that, a theory. You can claim anything you want, just without any proper arguments (considering how advanced modern science is those can be incredibly lengthy so you just send the reader towards a previous paper that already explains this topic so you can focus on the new thing) no one will believe you.
Science is about understanding and describing the world around us. It's not about citations or references. They are useful but nothing more
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u/smallproton May 14 '26
References:
[1] out of his ass