You and your queer world

[MargeB]

Ug, I always feared this

Or at least figured that since we were made by this dimension, we have nothing in common with all the other dimensions that may explain the whole thing.

Please, someone tell me he is totally WRONG! 

[MargeB]

Oh, and by the way, if you take recourse to evolution to explain all the behaviour you see in people, you shouldn't be surprised if overall you believe they are limited by it...

[jake-the-peg]

Dawkins is not alone here. JB Priestly once said the Universe is not only stranger than we understand but stranger than we can understand.

We can only really understand some concepts in Mathematics or analogy. Advenures in flatland was written over 100 years ago and is a two dimentional world and can help to understand how a four dimentional universe can work from our 3 dimension perspective.

Thing is analogies always break down, we try to decide if electrons are wave-like of partical like and this fails because they are in fact electron like.

That leaves us with mathematics which historically has been very sucessful in describing the physical nature of the universe. I guess one of the big questions is how far can that go? Is it actually possible to describe the universe mathematically? what are the limits? Is there an equivilent of the Heisenburg uncertainty principal in maths? 

[Clanad]

Pedantically, Heisenberg...

[MargeB]

Are you certain of that. Clanad? It looks probably right either way.

[OBonio]

I think he's right. Humans are driven forward by curiosity, forever looking for answers. Inevitably, with answers, come more questions. So, no, we will NEVER fully understand the universe.

A good idea teaching kids quantum physics though! They are more open to new ideas than most adults. Plus it seems to render current curriculum physics fairly pointless.

[MargeB]

I'm still uncertain in principle, OBonio (you sound like an irish porn star).

Question is (weird we're even asking it, huh?): is the universe largely unknowable? Maybe it's two questions:

1) Is the shape of our minds such that biases/schemas prevent us from asking the right questions.

2) Is the nature of our understanding and science and expression such that we are always limited to analogy with what we know in the final analysis, and because of this can never probe that which is not of our 'world', so to speak.

I always love Martin Rees's pet question (which someone told me is being answered???): What is reality? Ie, What features of our Universe are there as a result of the nature of the big bang (e.g gravitational constant, mass, energy, mirrors flipping left to right not up/down) and which are there because that's reality, ie you would have them in ANY type of Universe.

[MargeB]

I don't think my 1) and 2) are the same thing.

[landie]

Scientist will always be looking outside of the envelope of known fact to atempt a magical theory of existence.

It helps if your theory is not likely to be proved or disproved within the next couple of hundred years, as both the pronouncer and the critics will be long gone beforehand.

I claim that we live in a large cardboard box, so big that we will never reach the edges of it.

[Gef]

Either I am incredibly stupid or you lot are all nutters. (Qiuckly lowers head behind wall.) :-)

[bernardo]

.elpicnirp ciporhtna eht ekil tib a sdnuos sihT

[jake-the-peg]

Perhaps a "flatland" example may help

You are a square living in flatland and you are told that there is a mysterious third dimesion. - you reason that you might actually be living on the inside or outside of sometrhing called a "sphere" - obviously you can't envisage what this would be like and even the concept of "inside" or outside is a bit hazy.

So you find 3 points a long way away and draw a triangle - you find the angles add up to less than 180 degrees so you realise that you are indeed inside a sphere. But you only know this from the maths as your flt brain has no way of experiencing it.

In the same way we find that spherical bodies with mass have excess radius compared to what they should have geometrically which gives us the notion of curved space-time although we can only really grasp a fourth dimentionin a mathematical way like the square in the sphere.

http://elena.valdenza.it/science/myscience02.html

Is a nice easy discussion on curved space time in the same vein for anybody interested 

[MargeB]

Never thought of it like that before, Jake.

Bernardo, I've told you about doing that before. It took me half an hour just to get the mirror of the wall (again).

I think it involves the Anthropic principle, though not directly from the same argument. You start from the fact that Mankind exists...and now leap over to the fact that since this is pretty odd, the Universe (Fideists might think this more than me) is here FOR us, so would obviously be intelligible by us, since it was made for us and we were made to understand it. Because we simply evolved to thrive, not to know, I do not think this is the case.

This, however, is slightly different from what Jake is talking about...concentrating on the word 'Universe', as EVERYTHING, there is a bunch we can't know because we occupy limited dimensions. We find it even hard to get to grips with SPACETIME, because it's not really the dimension of interrelation in which the parameters important to our existence occur. Not to mention the other 7 dimensions. Maybe we can string it all together someday.

[MargeB]

landie..I'll only live til I'm about 80, I'm prepared to take my chances. The theory that 'the normal world around us as we see it is all there is' is just as big a leap of faith.

[landie]

I agree, margeB, who can say that we all experience the same stimuli from the world around us.

[MargeB]

Is what we know ultimately limited to the type or content of stimuli we receive?

<must avoid unbearable Humean breakdown before dinner time>

[mfewell]

MargeB, Dawkins is so much tomfoolery.  You need a belief. If you have no belief in God or an afterlife, then why bother anyway. (Nothing really matters). Because if you die and that's it, then just go for it, grab all you can without any regard for anyone else. And because if you die and that's it then there is no other reason to behave otherwise. What's the point in being good if there is no absolute value ?

If on the other hand John Chapter 4 says anything to you at all then maybe there is some hope left.

[MargeB]

I have faith. It's because I have faith that I am not prepared to accept the lack of faith which is traditional religious belief. Many religious people know that their beliefs are a bunch of nonsense but grasp them and allow the brain mashing to begin because they start with the assumption that life is meaningless. So it spreads, and leaves humanity without any grounded idea of what the hell its all about.

Humanists are even worse...mostly a reaction to religion, rather than a source of meaning in its own right.

Just because I do not accept traditional views of a 'Personal Guy in the Sky' does not mean I think there is nothing beyond the 'basic view'.

Having said that, my entire family is very religious and it does my bl**dy head in. Total and utter nonsense.

John 4 is a pack of lies. It represents a message and events of a man who is supposed to have said them: the writers made them up, know they made them up, and yet most christians tout them as gospel, so to speak. I hate religion with total venom.

[MargeB]

"What shape is green?": a question I heard was once asked by a blind person.

[landie]

It's a medium sized olive green cube.

[mfewell]

I would love to debate aspects of religion with you MargeB, even accepting that you'll reject the lot. I'll just make a couple of points that made me think. Why is it that people will accept without question, say, Caesar's account of the Gallic wars, but anything vaguely bible and they go into reverse. Infact there is far more evidence for the authenticity of the NT than for any other ancient literature including Caesar.

Jesus is an historical fact as I am sure you know from the Jewish historian Josephus.

Finally, why make it up ? Most people accept the crucifixion as a fact, possibly not you, but even so, we are hard put to explain the behaviour of the disciples afterwards. If the man just died, or swooned and recovered later, why were the disciples such transformed people after the (supposed) resurrection. Surely people do not go around dying as martyrs for something they know to be baloney ? Why would Paul as is sometimes claimed want to go off and invent a whole religion, finally being beheaded, all just for a myth ?

Organised religion has much to answer for. By the way, I am not a practising Christian (although I wish I could be), but I am very much a questioner.