It feels to me like the cost would be roughly proportional to how much is lost. Or maybe quadratic or something in how much is lost.
Like on the margin we probably regularly lose and rediscover unimportant physical discoveries, because it’s just too expensive to keep track of them. If there was some very important law that was magically lost with nothing else changed, then it would probably not take very long to stitch it together from context and observations.
But these observations would be based on advanced measurement devices that have been constructed in part using knowledge from physics, and the other context would also to a great extent be knowledge in physics.
If everything was missing—physics knowledge, measurement devices, even people who knew what could in theory be achieved—then yeah, that does seem prohibitively expensive to restore.
But that also seems to imply a very extreme case. Like with that much regress, having someone around to guard the truth probably isn’t sufficient to preserve it, instead it more seems like a societal destruction thing that needs to be averted. If society could continually identify and fix problems then this probably wouldn’t happen at all.
It feels to me like the cost would be roughly proportional to how much is lost. Or maybe quadratic or something in how much is lost.
Like on the margin we probably regularly lose and rediscover unimportant physical discoveries, because it’s just too expensive to keep track of them. If there was some very important law that was magically lost with nothing else changed, then it would probably not take very long to stitch it together from context and observations.
But these observations would be based on advanced measurement devices that have been constructed in part using knowledge from physics, and the other context would also to a great extent be knowledge in physics.
If everything was missing—physics knowledge, measurement devices, even people who knew what could in theory be achieved—then yeah, that does seem prohibitively expensive to restore.
But that also seems to imply a very extreme case. Like with that much regress, having someone around to guard the truth probably isn’t sufficient to preserve it, instead it more seems like a societal destruction thing that needs to be averted. If society could continually identify and fix problems then this probably wouldn’t happen at all.