Out There

I have always been very interested in cosmology -- as opposed to cosmetology, which never helped me very much.  I remember way back, reading about the discovery on the microwave background, in the mid-1960s, by two guys at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson.  It was the first real evidence that there was really a Big Bang.

The two great, almost unanswerable questions have often been of interest to the same people.  They attract me, partly because I always find myself thinking is big terms, and as my wife often points out, I get a bit sloppy with the details.

The two questions are "Where did we come from? -- How did ALL of THIS happen? and What is consciousness? -- How does that happen?

Even twenty years ago most scientists seem to feel that the answers to those questions was out of reach, and would stay that way for a long, long time.  Some even were ready to say that our little minds were not really capable of understanding all that.

Now, their doubts may be still true, but our little minds, or at least the combination of many little minds working with some great assists from wires, chips and 1s and 0s. have been able to come up with some very enticing ideas, and some fascinating possible explanations.  It may be proven at some point that all of these theories are just very clever ways of entertaining ourselves, but the whole process of searching for the answers seems much better and more useful than just walking away, or getting annoyed at the question.

I have just begun to read Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark, one of the physics professors at the local tech school. He is trying to make the case, and he admits that it is a bit beyond the usual realm, that the universe is really based on, and governed by, mathematics.

The scary part, and I have not really gotten that far into the book, is that from my own work with people, and trying to figure out why they do what they do, in terms of behaviors, thoughts, feelings, decisions, relationships and all, I have always had thoughts similar to that.

I do not think in numbers, or use beautiful mathematical formulas, but I have always felt that there are so many causes, factors and influences of behavior that a person's actions are really the result of all the combined, interactive influence of all of them, much more than having the person him/herself, make independent decisions.  I can remember way back when IBM was first becoming prominent and computers were beginning to become impressive machines, that I thought if this gets big enough, we could feed all the factors into this thing -- person, place, parents, culture, subculture, birth order, climate, genetics, nutrition, environmental toxins, diet, friends, school --- everything--- then we would be able to predict, with some degree of certainty, given what was happening to him or her, what he or she would do next.

We are not there yet.  But it is coming, kind of, and sooner than later.  And we will probably buy whatever it is they are selling, because that is what they will do with that information.

More of this, much more, later (and later).