injygo

The misunderstanding is in both how much and what information is contained in the data, how far you can make progress with it, and finally how one comes up/discards theories. The assumption is that the intelligence will come up with a specific model (General Relativity) as an hypothesis from the data. This is incorrect, the 3 snapshots of the fall of the apple (or the single one of the blade of grass) are grossly insufficent for this: there is no perceptible difference between the results of Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity on those pictures, and, very importantly, there is no basis in that data to build a relativistic model (specifically, which did not emerge from observations of falling bodies -no measurements precise enough to do so at the time-, but from issues in understanding the interactions between moving bodies and electromagnetism - there is *nothing* about the second in those data).

This is very important. It's not just a misunderstanding by Eliezer about the resolution of the data, but also about how you build theories from experimental data.

(I would have little objection* to a statement such as "given knowledge of the state of physics in the 1880s, the intelligence will come up with, at the very least a set of experiments to perform to resolve issues with Newtonian mechanics and, possibly, the first bricks of relativity)

*on those grounds