In the universe of philosophy, it’s easy to connect time and space, but in astronomy and physics it’s been a contentious “space” for a hundred years! What happens if we blur the line between the two, take our stethoscope to church, so to speak? How well is science arguing it’s version of “Creation?”
The universe is amazing. With technology today, we’ve seen the unimaginable, and it’s the stuff that feeds the same philosophy poised to pull it apart to try and make some sense of it!
The study of astronomy and subatomic physics requires treatment by philosophy. It’s an admittedly easy task for the philosopher, with plenty of “far out” things to criticize. But philosophy, drawing generously from scientific exploration and theory, can further concepts with an objective, non-expert view.
This work is a philosophical opinion of thus-known “facts” and their presentation, from a skeptical common man’s point of view, not only an important viewpoint, but in some cases the only one that matters, for example, for the common man! The universe is one topic anyone and everyone is interested in. All those people who’ve been living in it their whole lives!
One of my basic philosophical contentions is that observation must be done from a reality-based observational viewpoint, and that once theory moves beyond realtime observation it becomes effectively useless. This is our container, observability.
The idea of space “curving” is easy to see when viewed subjectively; it’s no more “confusing” to humans than the “fact” that the earth appears flat (but is really round). It’s not by adjusting time that long-view perspective is fixed (or because time is bent that it’s broken); it’s pure subjective perspective. Even possibilities that toy with time and distance, like time travel, purely theoretical, meaningless in every sense of the word, are nevertheless endlessly interesting to society, even the most faraway, impossible theory.
But, I believe, everything we will eventually ever understand is contained in events that take place in real time. Other realities, theoretically, may exist but can never be proven, because we, existing and “seeing” only in real time, would never be able to comprehend them. The audience’s eyes are very subjective.
The theories of relativity may, unconsciously, be appealing, because the concept feels comfortable in a sociological context, among us, who have not only lived, but improved and adapted, thrived, based on personal relationships, and this organic trait, being social, is mimicked by the concept of “relativity,” even if you don’t know much more about it than just its name.
And now there’s a new guy in town, tossing out a “single energy,” and one-dimensional unimaginableness. Mathematicians have their calculators out, journalists their pens. At the end of the public relations funnel, how their insights feel when they finally reach the general public is an orchestrated and important part of science’s process of experimenting, with public and investor tools, making guesses about what they’ll tell us are the most important experiments we, humanity, have ever undertaken.
(from the forthcoming book “Nothing,” by Mark Urso)