Meditations on Faith in Physics

I know what I know from my experiences; fire burns, water is wet, ice is cold; pain hurts, emotional and physical, I am confused and confusing; a mess of conflicting wants and desires; hunger for food, touch, love, respect, success, solitude…

Everything else outside of me is a matter of greater or lesser faith… you, her, him, them, it, gravity, oxygen, orbit, planet…

This isn’t about solipsism…

…no matter how objective I imagine myself to be, almost every single ‘fact’ about the world around me is based on ‘knowledge’ given to me… based on another’s inner knowledge gained through their personal experience of the world around them; I’m required to believe that this other’s experience is as valid as my own…

The facts I do know through my own experiences about wind (sailing, walking, freezing), water (sailing, bathing, swimming, drinking, cooking), gravity (capsizing, falling, tripping, dropping breaking), fire (burning, feeling, needing, hating, fearing), etc…

I’m describing the same challenge that has faced every previous generation about the equivalence of inner and outer facts…

The prevailing knowledge of the day has been the basis for understanding cause and effect; mystical, magical, empirical…

I could stop at…

… absence of proof isn’t proof of absence…

But it isn’t exactly compelling evidence of presence either… so, taking it further, rely on the testable, repeatable, probable instead for the consolidation of inner and outer facts into a more or less coherent system for understanding the world I live in…

The ethos of the source of outer facts is about my trust in their credibility, how ethical their methods, repeatable their findings, compelling their arguments…

But, however I balance the scales, almost 80% of my ‘knowledge’ of the world around me, physical, commercial, financial, personal, functional is based on faith, not direct empirical evidence…

I’m as much a victim of the knowledge of my time as all my antecedents were of theirs in their time…

• much like probability, over time, the median of knowledge approaches’1’…
• never completely knowable, just a little better approximated…
• 4 9s (99.99%) moves to 5 9s (99.999%)…