Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?

On Tue, 9 Oct 2018 09:40:32 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote:

I'm not sure what that's supposed to demonstrate, though. Times
change. Our understanding of nature, and of how to understand nature,
is radically different now. Do you think that nature will never be
understood? That there's an infinite depth to the fundamental laws,
and we can never reach the end?

Pretty much like peeling an onion. When you gain access to ever higher
energy collisions and rarer events you may see some new fine detail that
was not previously detectable. Likewise with bigger telescopes and
multispectral imaging - the first view of the universe at really high
resolution in the terahertz band will be significant for example.

Seeing more doesn't mean we learn more. Much of what we see now is
just confirmation of ideas we already hold. Confirmation isn't the
same as discovery.

Onions have centers. They're not layers forever.

I see the Universe as a simple place, with simple laws. Indeed, that's
the general view of modern physics, and all the available evidence
supports that view. A view which had not developed 150 years ago. At
some point, it appears we'll know everything. And we are arguably much
farther along that path now than we were 150 years ago. Our big
theories are highly stable. They continue to hold up, and new
observations continue to support them. 150 years ago new observations
were overturning the (rather weak) theories of the time.

Even the simplest canonical game of life with Conway's original rules
turns out to have extremely complex behaviour and is Turing complete.

Irrelevant to my point, which is that we understand the rules, not
that we can necessarily predict the behavior.