• wise_pancake
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    1 day ago

    The Vulcans are so focused on their logic they forget the universe is not rational. Even logic isn’t fully rational!

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        But isn’t our understanding of quantum physics predicated on logical and provable mathematical models?

        Also, I gotta point out that this is a Sci-Fi setting with superluminal travel, which is also supposed to be (practically speaking) impossible. A different kind of problem to be sure. But at some point it feels like the real unlimited power of the Federation is just realizing the fantasies of nerds from the 1970s.

        • OpenStars@piefed.social
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          21 hours ago

          Technically speaking, they never travel faster than light, since they bend the spacetime continuum so that light could always travel faster than they do.

          Instead, they travel faster inside that warped space than light would have traveled in non-warped space, but they don’t travel faster than the light can inside the warped space.

        • wise_pancake
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          1 day ago

          Yes and no. There’s a boundary where we can do math that says what might happen, but we can’t test those hypotheses. At least that’s my understanding.

          What I was referring to is Goedel’s incompleteness theorem which says that in a logic system there are things that are true that cannot be proven in the system, and logic systems can become complex enough that you can’t prove they’re consistent.

          So it’s not really saying logic is illogical, but it is saying in logic you sometimes have to build on foundations you can’t prove to be true, despite believing very strongly that they are.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            What I was referring to is Goedel’s incompleteness theorem which says that in a logic system there are things that are true that cannot be proven in the system, and logic systems can become complex enough that you can’t prove they’re consistent.

            If you get into the real guts of the theorem, the limit becomes a system attempting to describe itself.

            But there’s plenty of room for logical analysis outside the artificially engineered naval gazing that Goedel uses to prove incompleteness.

            in logic you sometimes have to build on foundations you can’t prove to be true, despite believing very strongly that they are.

            In logic, you do have certain unprovable truths known as axioms, which you use to form the foundation of a model. And one way to evaluate a model is to try and prove statements that force one axiom to contradict another (typically referred to as a paradox).

            “Time Travel is impossible” is a conclusion we can make IRL, but not one that holds in a narrative fantasy.