Reading this thread was interesting, a mixture of wonder and arrogance. The original link sadly is now dead, but I still find the comments interesting, and can easily imagine the sort of thing it linked to, having seen thousands of such things. I take interest in this sort of thread since I have a degree in a related field.
Anyways, whats interesting to me is just how grossly most people, in my opinion, overestimate how much we know of the universe, and our place within it. This is rather easy to do since we live in a culture which, like the Romans before it, assumes that it has essentially mastered everything worth mastering, and if there is anything left uin-mastered, it will soon fall before us or be understood.
Unfortunately, those scientists who keep abreast of the foundations of their fields know that they are never as solid as others would like to believe, and physics is no exception. If the string theorists whose theories are still in vogue (though less so every year) are correct, we see less of the universe then any caveman saw of the world, even with all of our telescopes and particle accelerators. If they are wrong, which they very well could be, then we are left with many puzzling questions about the fundamental nature of reality, and no clear answers except that our brains clearly did not evolve in such a manner as to allow us to easily comprehend it.
I don't really imagine most reading this post will pay much attention, or even understand what I mean, at least not to the scope of what I'm saying, which is a pity. I will say however that the more I learn of the universe, the more I am convinced we are but a dim candle in the middle of a dark room, and we cannot see much past our own flickering light. I don't think we've even really -begun- to understand the rules upon which the universe works, just the ones which happen to be the most prominent in the relatively small scale of energy and distance upon which our electromagnetic life operates. Even the portion of the universe along about the same scale and energies of us which we can perceive (i.e. the visible sky) isn't necessarily anything we can ever get to; despite what science fiction movies have trained you to believe.
But all this is natural, because each human is the center of his own world, within his own mind. Such it is, such has it always been.
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Topic: The Scale of the Universe (Read 7998 times)