Quote:
Originally Posted by Vettezuki
Most people can't grock calculus. Now try to teach it to a cat. I sometimes wonder if the distance between us and an accurate understanding of just the physical nature of the universe is like the difference between the calculus and a cat's capacity for understanding such abstractions. (i.e., isn't even in the cards for us to understand.)
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That's along my line of thinking and ties into my religious beliefs (or lack of) as well. I figure if our universe is so large and complex that it has taken thousands of years of observing to almost kinda understand whats going on in our little corner, and in reality we still don't know if what we think we know is right. Then it's over my head and to claim to have all the answers would be ignorant and pompous.
I love when these astrophysicists talk about dark matter and how they've come to the conclusion that it exists. It's always precluded by the statement "this is, if what we think we know about gravity is correct". Just puts it in perspective, humanity has been wrestling (literally) with gravity since before we could even comprehend what gravity was. We've been wrestling with gravity from the time we're in the womb. Yet we still do not understand it fully. We've had to concoct dark matter theories to match up what we observe to what we know. We have to come up with contorted string theory's to try unify what we know about macro physics and quantum physics and the rules that do and don't apply between them.
I think we might be worse off than a cat trying to understand calculus.
The scale of the universe!
