Newtonian gravity states that objects are attracted to each other in proportion to their mass. A webcam video of two apples falling will show two objects, of slightly differing masses, accelerating at the exact same rate in the same direction, and not towards each other. When you don’t know about the earth or the mechanics of the solar system, this observation points against Newtonian gravity.
[...] But it requires postulating the existence of an unseen object offscreen that is 25 orders of magnitude more massive than anything it can see, with a center of mass that is roughly 6 or 7 orders of magnitude farther away than anything it can see in it’s field of view.
IMO this isn’t that implausible. A superintelligence (and in fact humans too) will imagine a universe that is larger than what’s inside the frame of the image. Once you come up with the idea of an attractive force between masses, it’s not crazy to deduce the existence of planets.
IMO this isn’t that implausible. A superintelligence (and in fact humans too) will imagine a universe that is larger than what’s inside the frame of the image. Once you come up with the idea of an attractive force between masses, it’s not crazy to deduce the existence of planets.