Tom Engle
Tom Engle
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

I see the problem as having two parts.

First there is always an issue of scale. Imagine if I try to make a paper airplane from a piece that is 0.5 x 0.25 inches. It will never fly. Likewise is I try to make it out of a piece of paper 2 meters by 1 meter, it will never fly….for entirely different reasons. The “physics” that is involved is dependent on scale. The universe is the same. For example there is a scale for quantum mechanics, a scale for Newtonian physics, and a scale for dark energy. Like the paper airplanes, the borders between the realms are not so distinct as black and white. But one things has always proven true, when we look harder and when we look farther we look we often find new sets of rules. This will go on infinitely and humans will never reach “the end.” Why do we insist that everyday physics laws have to apply to the first seconds after the big bang, where temperature, pressures, densities, and ther properties were far outside the normal range in which our physics was derived. To be cynical in fact, the constancy of the speed of light has only been truly verified within the scale of our solar system at 13.7 billion years after the big bang.

Second, are the issues really a failure of physics, or a failure of our current mathematical tools???? For example, when we try to model the center of black hole or the original universe we come to a “singularity” which is a fancy way of saying our mathematics no longer works. Yet we believe those parts of the universe exist despite the failure of our math. If we believe what we see and/or speculate is correct, then we have a situation where our present tool of math fails to correspond to reality.Our present math is a human constructed tool. just like the paper airplanes there is no reason to expect it to work the same at all scales, just because it is so successful at the scales in which we have existed up to now. In fact we should expect that it won’t.

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    Tom Engle

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    Tom Engle