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Interesting view. Near the end, it says:

“The crux of today's cosmological paradigm is that in order to maintain a mathematically unified theory valid for the entire universe, we must accept that 95 percent of our cosmos is furnished by completely unknown elements and forces for which we have no empirical evidence whatsoever.”

Empiricism is based on sense observations. And a lot of science has been confined to human senses. I’m curious if tapping into more basic science research by analyzing different types of senses, for instance, available to animals, may offer breakthroughs down the line. For instance, fish employ the lateral line system to detect pressure gradients in the environment.

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When it comes to cosmology, our observations have been using light, because that's what has traveled in space. It is pretty obviously not that useful to ask a dog to sniff the sky or a homing pidgeon to navigate to Alpha Centauri, or something. We've obviously long since passed using only the visible spectrum.

We also recently added gravitational wave detection to our repertoire. I seriously doubt any animals out there are detecting gravitational waves.

I'm not sure how a science based on observing every wavelength of light we can get our hands on, the vast majority of which no animal on Earth can detect or use, and also gravitational waves, is "confined to human senses".

Yes and no. Yes, we're seeing gravity waves and radio waves and gamma rays and near infrared and millimeter wave and neutrinos, and maybe a few others that I forget. We're way past human senses, or any animals.

And yet I keep thinking of a deaf species that runs across Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. They can put an oscilloscope on the pressure waves in the air, so they can "see" what's going on. They can study the different frequencies of vibrations, and they can find patters in the time variation of those frequencies.

But they can't hear it. Hearing Beethoven's Ninth is really different from studying the frequencies with an oscilloscope. They could even hook up a brain scanner to a human listening to it, watch the brain start lighting up, and they still wouldn't understand.

We can gather data via all these different frequencies and modes. And yet I wonder how much we're not getting, not because we don't have the data, but because we don't have the right... something. (I can't even figure out what words to use for that something. The music analogy is the best I can do.)

I actually think there's a bit of an answer to that, in the No Free Lunch theorem. To "experience" Beethoven's 9th Symphony, you need cognitive biases that it can tickle in the way that Beethoven intended. An alien missing those biases won't "get it", but then they'll get things we won't. But there's no solution to having the right biases for everything. All we can do is throw a lot of things at it and hope for the best, and what's more, that's the best we or any alien in the physical universe could do.

(Heck, you don't even need a deaf species. There's a lot of reason to believe that birds don't experience music the way we do, and they're not even strictly speaking "aliens".)

So there's no particular gain to worrying about being limited to "human" senses, because there is no actionable way to "transcend" them in that sense other than by being something other than what you are. It's certain to be true, there's nothing to be done about it that we aren't already doing, and thus, it isn't really an interesting criticism to vaguely suggest that we should somehow be something other than ourselves.

I wasn't suggesting that we should be other than ourselves - just that, by being ourselves, there are things that we don't "get", even when we can see the data.

> Hearing Beethoven's Ninth is really different from studying the frequencies with an oscilloscope.

I'm not sure that's a good analogy. When you hear Beethoven's Ninth, you're not understanding it any more than someone who drives a car is understanding the car. You can enjoy it. Which is to say, you have an appreciation for its acoustic beauty but that doesn't really have anything to do with understanding it.

Perhaps there is some intelligence that set up the cosmos and they get some aesthetic pleasure from it. And perhaps our experience is too foreign from those being's to get the same pleasure from it but that does not mean that minus that experience we can't understand entirely how it works.

> Which is to say, you have an appreciation for its acoustic beauty but that doesn't really have anything to do with understanding it.

Beethoven's Ninth has words (at least, the third movement does). If you speak German, you can understand them.

Access to higher dimensions? Aliens shaking their heads as we waste enormous amounts of energy to travel through R3 in a straight line instead of taking a short walk in R7.

This makes me think of a quote on humans and science.

Italo Calvino said, "science interests me precisely because of my efforts to escape anthropomorphic knowledge; at the same time, however, I'm convinced that our imagination can only be anthropomorphic".

I'm not sure how to take in this quote - I wonder where humans stand in the progression of science.

Useful note, I get this thought sometimes, too. And you write, “We can gather data via all these different frequencies and modes. And yet I wonder how much we're not getting, not because we don't have the data, but because we don't have the right... something.”

Do you mean some type of “receptor” that we might be unaware of? For instance, data is flowing by but we can’t recognize/capture it?

We also cavalierly assume that our brains are universal understanding machines. While we have no problem knowing that there are sounds we cannot hear, and light we cannot see, we're reluctant to admit that there are thoughts we cannot think. Concepts which may be true and universal, but which are literally inconceivable to us.

But if you believe the theory of evolution, there is no reason why you should assume that. Our brains evolved to give us a good enough answer, fast enough, enough of the time to give us an edge at surviving. Any ability to truly understand what's truly going on would be purely by accident.

It's a good analogy, although I feel compelled to point out that Beethoven never heard Beethoven's Ninth either, since he was profoundly deaf when he wrote it.

Would the idea of a flatlander being incapable of comprehending 3-space be similar to what you're thinking?

Probably. The flatlander may be able to create a 3-dimensional vector space as a mathematical construct, but still has no clue what it's like to walk around in 3D.

About this:

"It is pretty obviously not that useful to ask a dog to sniff the sky or a homing pidgeon to navigate to Alpha Centauri, or something."

That example might be bad, but there are others that are valid. For instance, in healthy human women, the menstruation cycle seems to be the exact length of the moon's orbit. Is that a coincidence, or do human bodies have a way of gaining data from the moon? If so, what is that data? Maybe the mechanism is as simple as a springy protein that can absorb tidal forces and convert it to an information signal. Or perhaps something novel is going on.

There are potentially a lot we can learn about the universe by making simple observations here on Earth.

> For instance, in healthy human women, the menstruation cycle seems to be the exact length of the moon's orbit.

That seems to be absolute coincidence. If there was a value in syncing to the lunar cycle it would stand to reason there would be a synchronization with the characteristics of the lunar cycle - ie ovulation on the 14th day or something. As it is, there is no link between when a woman's cycle and the lunar cycle begin, they just happen to occur with the same (ugh) period. I don't know what tidal forces women could be keying into that would result in totally seperate start and end dates.

It's also important to note the 28 days falls on the average, but the range is anywhere from 21 to 35 days for normal women. It's in no way the exact length of the moon's orbit.

When there is any kind of weak forcing function, they synchronize. Artificial light is a new phenomenon. Before, moonlight was extremely important to everyone.

> Maybe the mechanism is as simple as a springy protein that can absorb tidal forces and convert it to an information signal.

Tidal forces don't have periodicity of a month, but change twice a day:

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides...

"High tides occur 12 hours and 25 minutes apart. It takes six hours and 12.5 minutes for the water at the shore to go from high to low, or from low to high."

To detect the tidal forces in some organism that can't sample the sea level you'd need an organism of an immense size, not something of the size of any animal on the plant today.

> There are potentially a lot we can learn about the universe by making simple observations here on Earth.

We are making observations, but they aren't simple anymore.

It started with simpler methods than today's: there were ancient Greeks (more than 2000 years ago!) who correctly estimated the diameter of Earth and then also quite correctly calculated the distance of Earth to the moon, who haven't had too precise instruments. E.g. Hipparchus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus#Orbit_of_the_Moon

"According to Pappus, he found a least distance of 62, a mean of 67 1⁄3, and consequently a greatest distance of 72 2⁄3 Earth radii. With this method, as the parallax of the Sun decreases (i.e., its distance increases), the minimum limit for the mean distance is 59 Earth radii – exactly the mean distance that Ptolemy later derived."

We today precisely measure that distance to be 60.32 Earth radii.

Think about that it was more than 100 years before that famous "birth", that is, at least 120 years BC!

Still the bigger advances started when we used the instruments that enabled us to capture more signal than what just our senses without the instruments, or with the most primitive instruments, would. The first was Galileo's use of telescope to discover:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_moons

Some people have noticed that the amount of light at night, absent artificial lighting, varies markedly by the month.

I know that my cats notice. Indeed corals worldwide notice, despite lacking eyes.

Makes sense, and agree with the last point, “I'm not sure how a science based on observing every wavelength of light we can get our hands on, the vast majority of which no animal on Earth can detect or use, and also gravitational waves, is "confined to human senses"”. Thanks for the explanation.

What aren’t we using from the animal kingdom? We create sensors that are extra human. Infrared etc...

Maybe this is an unknown unknown problem. We can’t develop technology for senses we do not know about and so on.

Indeed, I agree with your point, “Maybe this is an unknown unknown problem.”

I’m not sure why my comment is being downvoted, is there something I said that’s in bad taste?

I think you’re fine. Sorry you’re getting downvoted.

What kind of senses available to animals are there that we should be using for science?

Also I'm not entirely sure what you mean that we're confined to "the 5 senses". First, humans have way more senses. Second, I don't think it's confining ourself to build technology that converts something we can't sense (like gravitational waves) into something we can (like a spreadsheet).

One way to think of scientific instruments: like telescopes, microscopes, voltmeters is that they are extensions of our senses.

But the reality of them is that they are not extensions of our senses, so much as compressors of experience. That is they map a broader reality into our limited sensate experience. When we use them we have to remember that the map is not the territory, and we have to be especially careful about artifacts they may introduce.

I agree, thanks for the note.

We have no better access to the sense data of the Ampullae of Lorenzini in a shark than we do to the signals recorded by a radio telescope. Arguably, our access is worse for the shark than for the telescope.

Ultimately, no matter what we use to record the data (animal or instrument), we can only access the results through our 5 senses.