Let us say here that the least thing that can be said and understood is that the BBT challenges our understanding and perception of this big world around us.
I think this has a lot to do with the way physics abstracts from our ordinary perceptions of things, that tossles with our daily world understandings. I think most part of the problems in the way we can understand this, lies on that field.

Take for instance our ordinary perception of causality. Time is just the awareness of the change, which can be measured. It's always one state of affairs leading to another, in an eternal way. So, it couldn't be, there was a beginning state. It can't be there was a time, in which there was no "before" or no time at all. It just doesn't make sense. But physics just refrains from the ordinary perception of time, and abstracts from it. In a way that things which couldn;t happen in our down to earth understanding, just boil up from phyisical explenations.
Same as with time, also our daily life cognition of space is being put under pressure by the way physics deals with space. In our down to earth thinking, space is not an entity, not something that has existence or any properties of it's own. It's just the 'mode of existence' (same as time) of matter, moving in an eternal way.
So, if physics explains to me, space is curved, I might well respond, that such a thing is nonsense, there is nothing there that can have curvature. Space in the physical explenation is just a handy framework to work with, which can be modelized in difficult equations, to explain the way matter moves. But if we intermix physics interpretations of time and space to our daily life, worldly interpretation of things, things just blurr out and make no sense. I think that is where the difficulty resides.
The way physics describes and defines things, just don't correspond with the way we humans understand the world to be.
That is where we get the trouble from, explaining physics reality to our daily reality. The way I understand reality, the world has not boiled up from some quantum fluctuation (literally 'out of nothing') or whatever physics understands it to be, and didn't have a beginning, but just has always been there, and will always be there, and is in eternal motion.

So, what I was trying to tell is that, although within it's own set of definitions physics and math makes sense and describe the world as it is, when it comes to explain terms in the way we human percept things and have cognition, these things just don't make sense. It's like they form two compartments of logic, and there is no way these can communicate with each other in a proper way. A truth in one domains, is just absolutely nonsense in the other domain.
So, in such a sense, we realy live in an "expanding world" in which the space between different compartments of knowledge and human understanding, just keeps on stretching in such a speed, that in a way these compartments of knowledge don't have a way of communicating which each other.
We live in a world, we like to make sense of. For no other reasons we have invented science, to explain reality to us. But the way science has developed over the years, they developed into finding abstract truths, but we have still the task to make sense of it all, and has to be confined to the real world we as humans are living in.
The search for the truth about, which has lead to people claiming that we are about to have a "theory of everything". If we boil this down to what this means in the compartment of where we humans live (which is not the world of vacuum fluctuations, electrons, photons, and quantum mechanics) and spent our lifetime in, it might well be called a theory of essentially nothing, cause in te real world, it doesn't explain anything at all. It doesn't provide anything for any human being, it doesn't accomodate the world to be in more harmony with itself, it doesn't provide the basic human needs for all of humanity.
How many of earth population would realy know or care about, of what science has to tell about these domains of knowledge. A very small percentage I would guess. So how do we explain to us humans, all of humanity, the reason for spending billions of dollars on high tech research of where are origins are of how the cosmos came into being and all that, if this just is hopelesly inapproppriate for our daily life needs for must of us. Is it realy worth the spending in terms of energy, time, money, human talent and labour for? In human terms, I just can't abstract from that, and make sense of this. And I don't think I am the only one there, having some reflections on that. Maybe that some people are now showing signs of "redshift", and hasten to "stretch the space" between themselves and this, but that is just the way it is. The abstract knowledge scientific research has accumulated over the years, is in human terms inadequate of explaining anything of real meaning in the field of human knowledge.
It maye have satisfied human curiosity and understanding, but in the field of the needs of humanity, it only plays a marginal role.

Just some things to think about....


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: heusdens on 2002-11-21 14:47 ]</font>