Looking out the window at the brief stillness of the trees outside, of the sky so pale with smog, of the flats so gray, so sad, my thoughts began to drift.
We are just, as a civilization, getting used to the smallness of our lives, of our brains, in comparison to the size of the universe. We are amazed at the complexity that can be achieved in plants, animals and virii, which have a size of almost zero, compared to the radius of our local cluster.
So it is not unnatural to raise the question: what complexity can very large structures posses? To address this question the speed of information transmission must be taken into account, and one could at first argue that distances measured in light years are way too large for information storage and processing. But is this intrinsic to the distances themselves, or is it relative to other, faster, processes which the components of such a system may undergo? Let us just remember that there are processes small in space yet large in time, such as those studied by geology.
What amazingly complex things may we see if we build a incredibly wide-angle deep-field videocamera and watch it for long enough? Is there any thing that might prevent large complex structures from existing?
All of this has made a question pop into my mind: what do we mean by small and large? In a video I posted some months ago, Richard Dawkins argues that those concepts are relative to the sensibility of our senses. Enhancing our senses with apparatus of various kinds has helped in giving us a better idea of the scales of natural phenomena and the range of which human lives go on.
In this quest for a grip on the size of things, two facts have been discovered, or aproximated. One is the size of the universe, based on the velocity of receding distant galaxies and the well known constant-ness of the speed of light. The other is the discovery that certain forces, namely the strong nuclear, are of effect in only very small scales. Conversely, the effect of gravitation is negligible at this same scales.
Given all of this, one comes to wonder: is it possible that the matter interactions that our instruments are able to measure are only those in scales not larger than what we call the size of the universe? what if there is another, yet to be discovered type of interaction which is negligible at such scales but much more important at even larger ones?
Can our current theory give us any hints in proving or disproving this?
If a sort of very-large scale aggregation of matter exists, in such a way that between one cluster of matter and the next the four forces we know have no effect, could we be living in deception?
We are just, as a civilization, getting used to the smallness of our lives, of our brains, in comparison to the size of the universe. We are amazed at the complexity that can be achieved in plants, animals and virii, which have a size of almost zero, compared to the radius of our local cluster.
So it is not unnatural to raise the question: what complexity can very large structures posses? To address this question the speed of information transmission must be taken into account, and one could at first argue that distances measured in light years are way too large for information storage and processing. But is this intrinsic to the distances themselves, or is it relative to other, faster, processes which the components of such a system may undergo? Let us just remember that there are processes small in space yet large in time, such as those studied by geology.
What amazingly complex things may we see if we build a incredibly wide-angle deep-field videocamera and watch it for long enough? Is there any thing that might prevent large complex structures from existing?
All of this has made a question pop into my mind: what do we mean by small and large? In a video I posted some months ago, Richard Dawkins argues that those concepts are relative to the sensibility of our senses. Enhancing our senses with apparatus of various kinds has helped in giving us a better idea of the scales of natural phenomena and the range of which human lives go on.
In this quest for a grip on the size of things, two facts have been discovered, or aproximated. One is the size of the universe, based on the velocity of receding distant galaxies and the well known constant-ness of the speed of light. The other is the discovery that certain forces, namely the strong nuclear, are of effect in only very small scales. Conversely, the effect of gravitation is negligible at this same scales.
Given all of this, one comes to wonder: is it possible that the matter interactions that our instruments are able to measure are only those in scales not larger than what we call the size of the universe? what if there is another, yet to be discovered type of interaction which is negligible at such scales but much more important at even larger ones?
Can our current theory give us any hints in proving or disproving this?
If a sort of very-large scale aggregation of matter exists, in such a way that between one cluster of matter and the next the four forces we know have no effect, could we be living in deception?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_structure_of_the_cosmos
No comments:
Post a Comment