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Do you ever marvel at the fact that we have learned and continue to learn so much and yet still really understand basically nothing about why this universe exis

Do you ever marvel at the fact that we have learned and continue to learn so much and yet still really understand basically nothing about why this universe exists, what its limits are, what’s driving its changes, and what its ultimate fate will be? We don’t know what we don’t know, and we’re trying to figure out how a black box works from inside an infinitesimally small corner of it. Frankly, I find it amazing we’ve worked as much as we have.

beamatronic 5y ago
Webb telescope will change everything, once again.
- tzfld 5y ago
  People tend to have unrealistic expectations from it lately.
Aperocky 5y ago
Which is really nice, because nothing on Earth really matters when you consider the scale of the universe that we live in. Very blessed to be an observer though.
- wait_a_minute 5y ago
  It is not the scale of the universe that would determine if Earth matters or not, but whether or not there is significance to the universe and to Earth. Significance conferred by observers or parties interested in these things. Example: $100 isn’t less or more just because of increasing or decreasing the physical footprint of the bill. We still confer a purchasing power of $100 to a $100 bill regardless of the bill’s physical dimensions. So the takeaway here is that it’s a non-sequitur to say that because of Earth’s small scale relative to the rest of space, nothing on Earth matters.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    You're right, we still matter as people, but only for our own feelings and circumstances. It's humbling because it puts all that hubris away, which most people tend to have an excessive amount of - and begin to focus on living and achieving simple happiness instead of some illusion of grandeur.
    - wait_a_minute 5y ago
      How do you know that people matter only for our own feelings and circumstances?
onion2k 5y ago
Do you ever marvel at the fact that we have learned and continue to learn so much and yet still really understand basically nothing about why this universe exists, what its limits are, what’s driving its changes, and what its ultimate fate will be? Not really. Modern science has been looking at the origin of the universe for less than a single human lifespan. It's not surprising how little we know. It's pretty amazing that we know anything really. If you'd been studying physics 70 years ago you'd be wondering if the Big Bang or the Steady State theory is right.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world changing improvements in the last 2 generations/lifetimes. Crazy. Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. I'm still blown away by the memory of getting constantly lost growing up, my dad hand drawing maps for people, comedians stopped telling jokes about men not asking for directions and it still feels like nobody stopped to notice. It's partly that impulse to never stop and appreciate what we have, that dissatisfaction, that keeps people pushing into the unknown.
  - simonh 5y ago
    >Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. The usual prediction I see is that the rate of discovery will continue and in another 2 lifetimes everything we think we know now will seem just as silly and naive as what people believed 2 lifetimes before us. I don't think that's the case. It's a question of whether we're on a (near) infinite exponential curve of discovery, or on the rapid upward stretch of an S curve. I'm in the S curve camp, and I suspect we're at least half way up it on most topics. Just look at relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. Most of the great discoveries in these fields were actually quite a while ago. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are over 100 years old and most of the advances were made in the early decades. Progress has not stopped but massively slowed down. In cosmology it's been slower progress, but we've charted time back to milliseconds after T=0 of the big bang, detected thousands of exoplanets, analysed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and mapped the cosmic microwave background. There's more to learn about dark matter and dark energy for sure, some serious mysteries there, but how much difference will those answers actually make? The Higgs boson discovery was cool, but really just a cherry on top of the standard model rather than a revolutionary discovery that upended science. I'm not sure there are any of those still to come. The closing chapter on the big questions in science still has to be written, but I think the chances it will force us to completely rewrite, rather than simply revise and update the previous chapters, seems slight IMHO. I'm expecting the GUT to simply update or reframe relativity and quantum mechanics to make them compatible, not throw them out completely. It truly is astonishing to be alive at this nexus in human development, whatever our individual take on it might be.
chrononaut 5y ago
This. It's amazing when you also take into account that the beings evaluating it originated from the very arbitrary matter that we strive to understand. I always express that the greatest science "fiction" story is actually the reality above us, and the multitude of unanswered questions.
- papito 5y ago
  I actually find that the process of formation of everything around us is pretty straight forward. After all, none of it is explained by magic. Now, how all this shocking amount of matter came to exist from energy, which also had to come from somewhere... That's a head scratcher alright. The path to God is hidden behind rock solid plausible deniability.
gtsop 5y ago
The world is infinate, so the knowledge we have of it will always be a subset.
albert_e 5y ago
One less discussed aspect of how small and insignificant a place we occupy in the grand scheme of things is the time scale. Our entire civilization past and future may be just a momentary bubble in a cosmic ocean frothing with countless happenings for aeons.
- devmunchies 5y ago
  That’s not less discussed. That concept is pervasive in media, literature, and philosophy. Nihilism 101.
- officialjunk 5y ago
  say an advanced civilization learns how to time travel and walk the multiverse. trying to find us would be hard. the time scale is very small, yes, we occupy a small area, true, but also the scale of life itself may not be discussed much. there's dozens upon dozens of orders of magnitude of space that a being could occupy. scanning for life through the multiverse and time, it would also be easy to miss us. too small and you see cells and organelles, larger we see organs mixed with bacterial cultures, etc, and at just the right scale we are visible. there are arguments that earth is a living entity, and there may be larger forms of life going many orders of magnitude larger than planet-sized. with such a large range of time, location and scale to scan for life, it could be argued we basically don't even exist.
  - lisper 5y ago
    > it would also be easy to miss us Or maybe they found us but they just don't care because on cosmic scales we aren't as special as we appear to be from our own limited perspective.
papito 5y ago
A couple of years ago, Netflix added a science series about the Universe, and I could not understand why they referred to the process behind planet and star formation as a mystery. We know that dust, left to just float in space, will create clumps, rocks, boulders, and so on - due to microgravity. The series was from the mid 2000s. No one suggested this very obvious process until an astronaut on the ISS had a fine-grain substance in a small plastic bag (no, not THAT one), and they noticed the grains stuck together.
- pleb_nz 5y ago
  Interesting as I thought that the theory was quite old. Certainly sure I believed that well before the mid 2000s. And a quick search on DDG says that theory was first proposed in 1941 referring to plant formation?
- cgriswald 5y ago
  You're sort of conflating what scientists are pretty sure about in a general sense and what they actually know about how it works in the specifics. Take a look at the wikipedia page for this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis Just as an example: > The formation of planetesimals is the biggest unsolved problem in the nebular disk model. How 1 cm sized particles coalesce into 1 km planetesimals is a mystery. This mechanism appears to be the key to the question as to why some stars have planets, while others have nothing around them, not even dust belts.
thom 5y ago
It does sometimes feel like we wake up, stretch, and open our eyes every morning to realise we're at the edge of a cliff, the ground plummeting away into fog beneath us. But then we roll over and there's green grass on the other side, so off we go to work. That said, whatever breakthroughs we make from one generation to the next, what a stroke of luck it is that some things remain constant: we can fall in love, enjoy a good story, drink, eat, be merry, and argue about the meaning of life in whatever fora present themselves.
- cainxinth 5y ago
  My response to the question “why does reality exist?” has always been: “I don’t know, but we might as well check it out.”
still_grokking 5y ago
Modern physics indeed isn't any closer answering the big questions as it was when physics got established as part of science. We don't know what space, time or matter are. We don't know where it's coming form or where it's going. And we don't know most things in between. It's a marvel we figured out so much about how some details seem to work given we still don't know mostly anything about the more fundamental phenomena. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
porkbrain 5y ago
I made my peace with the fact that some set of sets of abstract rules makes absurd but precise predictions about what I perceive, and I will never know why. I try to direct my marvel on how can I be but a collection of interconnected automata perceiving these rules on scale.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
> an infinitesimally small corner of it. By what scale, exactly? This corner is just as large as it is small. There are an equivalent number of grains of sand on Earth than there are stars in the observable universe. We are not small. Size doesn't work like that. Space is everywhere, including here.

beamatronic 5y ago

Webb telescope will change everything, once again.

tzfld 5y ago
People tend to have unrealistic expectations from it lately.

Aperocky 5y ago

Which is really nice, because nothing on Earth really matters when you consider the scale of the universe that we live in. Very blessed to be an observer though.

wait_a_minute 5y ago
It is not the scale of the universe that would determine if Earth matters or not, but whether or not there is significance to the universe and to Earth. Significance conferred by observers or parties interested in these things. Example: $100 isn’t less or more just because of increasing or decreasing the physical footprint of the bill. We still confer a purchasing power of $100 to a $100 bill regardless of the bill’s physical dimensions. So the takeaway here is that it’s a non-sequitur to say that because of Earth’s small scale relative to the rest of space, nothing on Earth matters.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  You're right, we still matter as people, but only for our own feelings and circumstances. It's humbling because it puts all that hubris away, which most people tend to have an excessive amount of - and begin to focus on living and achieving simple happiness instead of some illusion of grandeur.
  - wait_a_minute 5y ago
    How do you know that people matter only for our own feelings and circumstances?

onion2k 5y ago

Do you ever marvel at the fact that we have learned and continue to learn so much and yet still really understand basically nothing about why this universe exists, what its limits are, what’s driving its changes, and what its ultimate fate will be? Not really. Modern science has been looking at the origin of the universe for less than a single human lifespan. It's not surprising how little we know. It's pretty amazing that we know anything really. If you'd been studying physics 70 years ago you'd be wondering if the Big Bang or the Steady State theory is right.

fellowniusmonk 5y ago
Honestly our rate of increased knowledge is unreal, basically humanity had very little tech/science improvements for most of our history and then just world changing improvements in the last 2 generations/lifetimes. Crazy. Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. I'm still blown away by the memory of getting constantly lost growing up, my dad hand drawing maps for people, comedians stopped telling jokes about men not asking for directions and it still feels like nobody stopped to notice. It's partly that impulse to never stop and appreciate what we have, that dissatisfaction, that keeps people pushing into the unknown.
- simonh 5y ago
  >Who knows what things will look like in 1 more lifetime. The usual prediction I see is that the rate of discovery will continue and in another 2 lifetimes everything we think we know now will seem just as silly and naive as what people believed 2 lifetimes before us. I don't think that's the case. It's a question of whether we're on a (near) infinite exponential curve of discovery, or on the rapid upward stretch of an S curve. I'm in the S curve camp, and I suspect we're at least half way up it on most topics. Just look at relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology. Most of the great discoveries in these fields were actually quite a while ago. Relativity and Quantum mechanics are over 100 years old and most of the advances were made in the early decades. Progress has not stopped but massively slowed down. In cosmology it's been slower progress, but we've charted time back to milliseconds after T=0 of the big bang, detected thousands of exoplanets, analysed the gravitational waves from black hole collisions and mapped the cosmic microwave background. There's more to learn about dark matter and dark energy for sure, some serious mysteries there, but how much difference will those answers actually make? The Higgs boson discovery was cool, but really just a cherry on top of the standard model rather than a revolutionary discovery that upended science. I'm not sure there are any of those still to come. The closing chapter on the big questions in science still has to be written, but I think the chances it will force us to completely rewrite, rather than simply revise and update the previous chapters, seems slight IMHO. I'm expecting the GUT to simply update or reframe relativity and quantum mechanics to make them compatible, not throw them out completely. It truly is astonishing to be alive at this nexus in human development, whatever our individual take on it might be.

chrononaut 5y ago

This. It's amazing when you also take into account that the beings evaluating it originated from the very arbitrary matter that we strive to understand. I always express that the greatest science "fiction" story is actually the reality above us, and the multitude of unanswered questions.

papito 5y ago
I actually find that the process of formation of everything around us is pretty straight forward. After all, none of it is explained by magic. Now, how all this shocking amount of matter came to exist from energy, which also had to come from somewhere... That's a head scratcher alright. The path to God is hidden behind rock solid plausible deniability.

gtsop 5y ago

The world is infinate, so the knowledge we have of it will always be a subset.

albert_e 5y ago

One less discussed aspect of how small and insignificant a place we occupy in the grand scheme of things is the time scale. Our entire civilization past and future may be just a momentary bubble in a cosmic ocean frothing with countless happenings for aeons.

devmunchies 5y ago
That’s not less discussed. That concept is pervasive in media, literature, and philosophy. Nihilism 101.
officialjunk 5y ago
say an advanced civilization learns how to time travel and walk the multiverse. trying to find us would be hard. the time scale is very small, yes, we occupy a small area, true, but also the scale of life itself may not be discussed much. there's dozens upon dozens of orders of magnitude of space that a being could occupy. scanning for life through the multiverse and time, it would also be easy to miss us. too small and you see cells and organelles, larger we see organs mixed with bacterial cultures, etc, and at just the right scale we are visible. there are arguments that earth is a living entity, and there may be larger forms of life going many orders of magnitude larger than planet-sized. with such a large range of time, location and scale to scan for life, it could be argued we basically don't even exist.
- lisper 5y ago
  > it would also be easy to miss us Or maybe they found us but they just don't care because on cosmic scales we aren't as special as we appear to be from our own limited perspective.

papito 5y ago

A couple of years ago, Netflix added a science series about the Universe, and I could not understand why they referred to the process behind planet and star formation as a mystery. We know that dust, left to just float in space, will create clumps, rocks, boulders, and so on - due to microgravity. The series was from the mid 2000s. No one suggested this very obvious process until an astronaut on the ISS had a fine-grain substance in a small plastic bag (no, not THAT one), and they noticed the grains stuck together.

pleb_nz 5y ago
Interesting as I thought that the theory was quite old. Certainly sure I believed that well before the mid 2000s. And a quick search on DDG says that theory was first proposed in 1941 referring to plant formation?
cgriswald 5y ago
You're sort of conflating what scientists are pretty sure about in a general sense and what they actually know about how it works in the specifics. Take a look at the wikipedia page for this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis Just as an example: > The formation of planetesimals is the biggest unsolved problem in the nebular disk model. How 1 cm sized particles coalesce into 1 km planetesimals is a mystery. This mechanism appears to be the key to the question as to why some stars have planets, while others have nothing around them, not even dust belts.

thom 5y ago

It does sometimes feel like we wake up, stretch, and open our eyes every morning to realise we're at the edge of a cliff, the ground plummeting away into fog beneath us. But then we roll over and there's green grass on the other side, so off we go to work. That said, whatever breakthroughs we make from one generation to the next, what a stroke of luck it is that some things remain constant: we can fall in love, enjoy a good story, drink, eat, be merry, and argue about the meaning of life in whatever fora present themselves.

cainxinth 5y ago
My response to the question “why does reality exist?” has always been: “I don’t know, but we might as well check it out.”

still_grokking 5y ago

Modern physics indeed isn't any closer answering the big questions as it was when physics got established as part of science. We don't know what space, time or matter are. We don't know where it's coming form or where it's going. And we don't know most things in between. It's a marvel we figured out so much about how some details seem to work given we still don't know mostly anything about the more fundamental phenomena. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...

porkbrain 5y ago

I made my peace with the fact that some set of sets of abstract rules makes absurd but precise predictions about what I perceive, and I will never know why. I try to direct my marvel on how can I be but a collection of interconnected automata perceiving these rules on scale.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

> an infinitesimally small corner of it. By what scale, exactly? This corner is just as large as it is small. There are an equivalent number of grains of sand on Earth than there are stars in the observable universe. We are not small. Size doesn't work like that. Space is everywhere, including here.