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The “perfect map” paradox: Why scientific models can never be complete
https://bigthink.com/13-8/the-perfect-ma...-complete/

KEY POINTS: Science can be thought of as a series of maps of nature, striving to be ever more complete, as models and theories evolve. However, just as no map can contain all of the territory’s information, our maps of reality will always be incomplete. The expectation that we can build theories of everything — complete maps of the Universe — is thus a misleading fantasy.

EXCERPT: The only perfect map is one that reproduces precisely all the details of whatever it is mapping, or the “territory.” Hence the paradox: If the map is as large as the territory, it has no value whatsoever. A perfect map is as useless as it is impossible to create.

The title of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “On Exactitude in Science,” is purposely ironic. Borges is poking fun at scientists who believe, quite naively, that their scientific models and theories are actually producing a perfect map of reality. If science can be understood as a map, a representation of what we see of the world, then nature is the territory.

The analogy is extremely apt, capturing both the goals and the frustrations of science: We want to know as much as possible about the world and turn it into a description that we can share (the map). The more we know, the better the map is. However, as the French philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle noted in 1686, there is only so much that we can see of the world. Any map we produce is necessarily incomplete. “All philosophy is the product of two things only: curiosity and shortsightedness,” he wrote in his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.

There is tension between our curiosity to always know more and our myopic gaze, the impossibility of seeing all. This tension is a good thing, one that inspires our creativity and inventiveness. [...] The danger, as Borges so cleverly admonishes us in his short story, is that our ambition can lead us astray... (MORE - missing details)
Quoting an AI..
Quote:The differences in galaxy properties between a universe with and without dark matter can be dramatic, with changes in the number, size, and distribution of galaxies by factors of 2-10 or more.
We know nothing about dark matter. The model of dark matter is .. we know nothing. Models aren't 'perfect' because there is so much about which we know nothing - I doubt if any actual physicist has any illusions about how much we know.