"Is it possible for something to be true but not understandable?"
"But what if it were possible to create discoveries that no human being can ever understand?"
A lot of epistemological smoke and mirrors are strewn about in this Slate article. If I get what's going on here, the point of this piece is to suggest that some physical laws or scientific facts that are fundamentally incomprehensible to human minds may be known or knowable by computers.
Didn't we more-or-less get past this with the Critique of Pure Reason? Yes, I see that picture of Karl Popper next to the lede, but he's just there to illustrate a minor point about scientific proof--one that would apply equally to artificial and human minds.
I'm answering No to the first question, based not on my sanguine esteem for the human intellect, but merely on the fact that nobody (not even the hypothetical hyper-intelligent artificial brain) will be able to make sense of what he means by "true" in that sentence. This is one of those Dinge an sich "trues" that won't stand up to scrutiny.
I'm going to answer No to the second one, too. Oh yes, it's possible that some distant race of intelligent aliens might be able to "discover" something about themselves that humans will never be able to know because we will never encounter them. That's a reasonable use of "discover." But for "discover" to make sense in any non-special-secret way, the discovery would have to be comprehensible to the human mind if it were exposed to it.
Nah, I'm going to say that I need a much better account of what a "discovery" might be like that can only be recognized and appreciated by an artificial mind.
The author of this article hides that difficult concept behind the familiar word "discovery" as if it should not be a problem. It is. A machine's iterative processes may detect patterns or relationships within massive amounts of data that no human individual would have the time or capacity to study. Is this a discovery? How would I (or anyone else, including another machine) know?
Explain It to Me Again, Computer