Middsumer’s night thoughts
Published by Esteban Glas on March 6th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Astronomy, Science
A gentle night, a little hot, looking outside the balcony with Luciana, beer in hand.
While watching the city skyline I point out “there’s Venus, and there’s Mars”. Which leads to an interesting discussion about the universe. I almost chose Astronomy instead of Music as a major, but several facts drove me towards music instead. Thus I was explaining Lu about Supernovas, the Big Bang, the Big Crunch, and black holes; then she strikes me with a question “but what is their function?”.
Luciana is currently doing her doctorate, she majored in biotechnology. For biology and genetics-related scientists everything has a function, a reason to exist, something to do (or at least something they did in the past, a big percentage of our genome is just inherited rubbish, genes that used to have a function in some previous evolutionary point, but are rendered useless for human beings; the reason why this “genetic noise” remains is still under debate). In astronomy, on the other hand, there is no such sense of functionality. Things are studied or theorized just to explain or complement observations. Purpose is not a part of it, things just happen or are (or were).
Thus I went along the unavoidable path: What if there is an underlying sense behind everything in the universe? I don’t mean in a religious way, that’s something I won’t get into.
What I mean is: is there a universal bigger picture astronomers and scientists are missing? A system with a purpose, instead of different events and facts that interact but seem rather casual, a means to an end, sort to speak.
I have to give this some more thought, though.
3 Responses to “Middsumer’s night thoughts”
Leave a Comment
Search
Feeds
Subscribe to The Challenge
Subscribe to Comments
Calendar
Ad Hoc Blogs
Friends
Lenovo Corporate Blogs
The Archive
- October 2008 (3)
- September 2008 (6)
- August 2008 (8)
- July 2008 (8)
- June 2008 (8)
- May 2008 (8)
- April 2008 (17)
- March 2008 (6)
- February 2008 (8)
- January 2008 (11)
- December 2007 (12)
- November 2007 (11)
- October 2007 (26)
- September 2007 (11)
- August 2007 (6)
- July 2007 (11)
- June 2007 (17)
- May 2007 (16)
- April 2007 (12)
- March 2007 (22)
- February 2007 (14)
- January 2007 (19)
- December 2006 (23)
- November 2006 (11)
- October 2006 (8)
- September 2006 (11)
- August 2006 (12)
March 6th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Esteban,
Reference “arguement by design”. Good points.
Purpose and Process go hand in hand. Are they human contrivances, or the truth? For example, unargueably chemical reactions occur. We have classified down to elements and named them. Whether or not we named the elements, they exist, but there may be more that we don’t yet know, or there could in time be another discovery about the nature of matter that we might make that would cause us to completely overhaul the periodic table. Great thoughts you have here - keep going.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Of course every answer and thought opens op a myriad of new questions. The sense of “purpose”, the idea that there might be such thing universally can have a ton of sub-questions, spanning from “is ‘purpose’ just a semantic human issue?” to “what is the system, end, means underlying the works of the universe”.
Such things male you feel rather small…
March 12th, 2007 at 11:16 am
[...] Very recently I posted some random thoughts on a deeper universal system underlying everything that escapes our current understanding. Quite coincidentally, while lost on my various feeds I came across this interview at wired Magazine. This in turn took me to the original article at The American Scholar. [...]