this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
77 points (96.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43983 readers
925 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The universe. The Big bang, time, quantum mechanics. Is our universe infinite? Is it the only universe? Did the Big bang start ours and will it end with a big crunch and will that collapse just cause a big bang that repeats and if so what iteration of that cycle do you suppose we are in? And does each universe behave the same, similar laws and physics and such? Stars, planets, etc?
Deconstructing from religion. It was a lot. I'm better now, but being stuck in it all was overwhelming and was like being in an existential crisis every day until it ended. I just went along with it and kept it all inside for decades and it wasn't fun.
Consciousness and our sense of self. Is consciousness an illusion? What even is "me"? It includes all the gut bacteria and mitochondria with different DNA than us and our brains are these amazing pattern recognition machines that also have abysmal memory storage and recall, but can notice the tiniest of nuance sometimes, but also can't remember where we put the thing we were just holding 2 minutes ago. And all the while our brain is confidently telling us "I am me" and is processing all the inputs like sights and sounds and interpreting all that into what we think we see and what we think we heard. But did we? How would we know if upon seeing the color red our brain interprets that as blue and we confidently declare we see red.
In the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, there was mention of a Shawken Device which, if operable, could destroy the universe.
This has led me to conclude that the universe probably isn't infinite.
In an infinite universe, all possible things should be happening at the same time. This would necessarily mean that someone invented a device/mechanism/reaction that could destroy the universe, and successfully activated it, thus ending the universe.
There are only two possible conclusions that I can draw from this thought experiment, which are not mutually exclusive:
Relativity proved that time isn't a constant thing where all things occur at "the present". You can have situations where person 1 sees an event happen as A B and person 2 sees that same event happen as B A.
That means time isn't some absolute framework that reality exists in, but something more like a property of matter or space or something.
Also the speed of light seems to be applicable here. Or more accurately, the speed at which events propagate through space. If you pushed a button to end the universe wouldn't that event only go at light speed out in all directions? So maybe the button has been pushed (maybe an infinite number of times too) and all the shockwaves just haven't gotten here yet.
This is only true if A and B are not causally related. If A causes B all observers will see A causing B.
Are you 100% on that? I thought it was recently proved that it actually could be reversed. Maybe I misunderstood. Thinking about this stuff makes my brain feel fuzzy and numb, but like, more than usual.
Yes, I am 100% on that.
If A causes B, that is true for all observers. Otherwise you get into causeless actions.
Imagine observer 1 (O1), sees one rock (A) crash into another (B) and it changes it's direction of travel. O1 has on opinion on the sequence of events.
How imagine observer 2, (O2) watching the same events from a different perspective.
There is no situation or perspective O2 can take which would have B change direction before the collision with A.
Therefore no matter their perspective both O1 and O2 agree on the sequence of events. Thus causality is fundamental.
Misunderstanding of infinity.
E.g.: 1.101100111000... is an infinitely long number, yet it will never be bigger than 1.2 nor smaller than 1.1, it does not contain all digits, nor does it contain all possible combinations of 0s and 1s.
I know, right? They barely make consumer grade products that last nowadays.
It's only infinite in the sense that it's beyond our measurement. And whether or not it is infinite doesn't even matter to us because of the speed of light and the expansion of space itself. There is a sphere around us that is all we will ever know or experience or be able to affect. Outside that sphere other things can and do exist, but we are fundamentally separated from them forever. There are entire galaxies we will never see because the light will never reach us. That is wild to me.
Well we know nowadays that the universe isn't infinite, but is expanding, and the speed of expanding is accelerating. We don't know if that will keep accelerating, if the universe will keep expanding forever.
How can you know or prove something isn't infinite if you haven't even seen all of it yet? Isn't proving it impossible? We could prove it to NOT be infinite, but it's like proving the non-existence of something, you can't really prove an edge doesn't exist just because you haven't seen one.
Because of the cosmic microwave background.
Here, this covers it quite well on a very basic level https://www.space.com/33892-cosmic-microwave-background.html