MendotoManteo
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What say you?
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I used to ponder things like this all the time. Then I quit doing so much LSD.
Let's start with the fact that the universe we see now has matter, energy, space and time. We experience each in somewhat a separate way, for example eating food, lighting a match, traveling down the highway, and experiencing how each word you are reading in this sentence keeps slipping into your past.What say you?
Points scored for the Douglas Adams reference.Let's start with the fact that the universe we see now has matter, energy, space and time. We experience each in somewhat a separate way, for example eating food, lighting a match, traveling down the highway, and experiencing how each word you are reading in this sentence keeps slipping into your past.
Physics experiments and observations give a different view not obvious to our separations above. Space-time and matter as energy "tied in knots" are new ways of better understanding the underlying reality in combining our common sense (a problematic sense, in various ways) notions to gain deeper understanding of what is actually going on. We next need to get to the idea that if matter is a complex, trapped form of energy, that so called "empty space" is demonstrated as not empty, but seething with energy on a subatomic scale. In fact space-time is energy as well.
There is an old joke answer to the question, framed as a sort of Big Question, by Douglas Adams, of "Life, the universe, and everything," which is facetiously revealed as not even a question at all, in the final analysis, so then the question needs to be found. That old joke answer was, "it's turtles all the way down." This was in response to the fake answer of what is under it all ("it all"), as being a giant turtle, and then, well what is under the giant turtle?
So taking this into the modern knowledge of physics and cosmology so far, the answer to what is matter, is, it's energy all the way down. People are often after something more at this point, and The Big Question at is really at root when they ask what is matter, or similar questions. If that is what you're after, let me know and I will have a bit of fun digressing on that.
Points scored for the Tolkien reference.Do you know how the Orcs first came into being? They were elves once, taken by the dark powers, tortured and mutilated. A ruined and terrible form of life.
Why would you quit?I used to ponder things like this all the time. Then I quit doing so much LSD.
That has been my lay person view. For me the first cause is existence and the "age" of the "universe" is an irrelevant concept.It just "is". And it's simple as that. Matter didn't just "come into being". It's always been there and always well be. This idea that "matter" has to have a "beginning" - a point in time... or a "how did it get here" - a physical way of entering into space and time... is basically tilting at windmills.
The How, Why, When and Where questions are just man-made constructs to try and establish a "reason" for being. The reason - and the answer to all those questions - is all the same. It is what it is. It just "is". I know that phrase is used all the time to explain the unexplainable (especially by football coaches at the presser) but "it is what it is".
So you were after more than matter. To expand on the something rather than nothing, and on your angle above:Points scored for the Douglas Adams reference.
Unless you are Timothy Leary, age catches up with you. I had the interesting experience of attending his lecture in Atlanta circa 1977. He was around 60yo and suggesting that over time we would be able to sustain our human lifespan forever.Why would you quit?
Google, Apple, Amazon and Zigbee hatched a planWhat say you?