Adonis Diaries

Sunny Labh

Aug 15, 2022

The Unanswered Questions in Física and Filosofía

10 Questions that have puzzled thinkers for ages

I’ve covered several aspects of physics, philosophy, theology, and mathematics in my stories before. The combination of these disciplines might seem a little absurd but I find them really fascinating.

I believe that the mere purpose of human existence is to try analyzing and understand themselves, and the universe and the world around them as well.

We’ve come a long way since the evolution of modern human beings in uncovering the secrets of the universe through our consistent quests. Nature, in several instances, provides hurdles throughout these quests, and sometimes because of that reason we question our own ability to comprehend the functions of nature.

While many such mysteries have been resolved through proper observation, analysis, experimentation, and thinking, there are many other questions that haven’t been answered yet.

In this story, I shall try to briefly introduce such questions primarily in physics and philosophy.

God

When someone says God, people often jump to the conclusion that they’re talking about the all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipotent creator. In the past, it was the greatest crime to deny the existence of God.

But when ciencia progressed and found a clearer path, various pieces of evidence, like evolution, it made it difficult to accept the verses in Bible and Quran in a literal sense.

So the modern interpretation would be, is there a reason behind our existence?

The concept of God shouldn’t just be limited to someone who looks like us. In the vastness of this universe, if it’s the higher beings that planted the first gene on earth, they’re our engineers, or it could be any causation that leads to the existence of all the matter and energy of this universe, that would be a God too.

The interpretation of God is different in different religions and this is a big question in modern science as science and most scientists deny the existence of God.

(Every religious sect has its own God, the all encompassing idol God. Every religious sect has a narrative of a Second Coming and the Super Hero will free them from the indignities suffered by other communities)

Free Will

When you make a certain decision on any matter at hand, is it entirely your choice or your actions have already been planned out? There have been speculations that we live in a simulated world, which makes sense theoretically.

If that’s the case, then all our life choices have already been planned out.

Also, there have been several studies that the decisions we make are greatly affected by our subconscious minds (the power of habits?)

So do we really have absolute control over our life or are the decisions we make shaped by the life choices and circumstances around us.

The Purpose

It’s often very difficult to imagine that after all the events that human civilization has gone through, it has all been for nothing, that there is not a greater purpose to our existence. (Maybe it is the following generations duty to uncover your contributions?)

It could either be the case that we’re here for a reason, or when we look at the unfathomable depth of this universe, we’re just trying to find meaning at the expense of our convenience that this all means something, when in fact we’re just a product of a simple coincidence.

The Good and Bad

Except for the simple examples that we see in movies about heroism and villainy, there’s no such analogy in real life.

The morality of people in this world is not black or white, but it’s rather grey. All that needs is a matter of perception of who’s good and who’s bad.

There are laws that state what is good or bad (depending on the justice system decision?).

But at the end of the day, they’re the laws made by us to keep ourselves in the lane (of the political system structure).

But what is the absolute truth? We may never know the answer. (Before jumping to absolute truth, it is important to define the premises of what is Truth)

Consciousness

The human brain is surprisingly more complicated than we think. There have been studies made on it and we’ve dissected every single part of it and designated the conclusions on what they’re responsible for.

But the very idea of consciousness is still a mystery. Does consciousness come with life? If so, does every living unit is a conscious unit? Why doesn’t a primitive bacteria have consciousness? Or does it?

At the very heart lies the greatest mystery of all of biology and psychology. Life itself becomes a big question in our comprehension of consciousness.

The Concept of Time

Since Einstein, physicists have considered space as a geometry of three dimensions with time being the fourth dimension. But as the principles of moving forward and backward and changing our position hold true for space, it should be theoretically possible that the same principles might apply to time.

But we only move forward in time, we only grow older, not younger, and finally, meet death. Most of the accepted laws of physics work with the unidirectional time and it defies logic and well-established theories if we consider time to be bidirectional.

The Extraterrestrial Business

As a result of the Fermi paradox, we could hypothesize that there must be millions of other planets like earth and millions of possibilities that life could have started there too.

Looking at the immensity of the universe and the time scale of the evolution of the universe, it should be obvious that intelligent creatures should exist and by intelligent I mean the ones that could potentially reach us and give us some signs of their existence.

But we’ve yet to make any contact. There have been several attempts made in the past to try and communicate with aliens but so far we haven’t succeeded.

Of course, there are many rumors and conspiracy theories about the existence of ETs but that seems more like the idea of terrestrial intelligence rather than extraterrestrial ones.

The telescopes have been scouring the skies relentlessly to find a subtle hint of life out there, but we’ve yet to encounter any if none.

Prime Numbers

Unlike integers, odd or even numbers, prime numbers are not so uniformly distributed. They’re the unique numbers that could only be divisible by 1 and themselves.

But a German mathematician claimed that the frequency of occurrence could be roughly predicted by the Reimann Zeta function, yet this has yet to be proved. Mathematicians say, if this is solved, the entire basis of modern capitalism, financial system, and cryptocurrency would crash within seconds because all use prime numbers as the encryption for their security.

Something really fascinating to think about, isn’t it?

Reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

There have been two overarching ideas on physics namely the General theory of relativity provided by Albert Einstein in the mid-1920s and Quantum Mechanics which was developed in the early 1900s and throughout the 30s and 40s by various prominent physicists like Planck, Dirac, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Feynman.

While they both do a good job of explaining the universe, they have different perspectives on how things actually work.

The laws that work in the respective areas don’t seem to work when the areas are swapped i.e, the laws that govern the quantum world don’t seem to stay fit in the large-scale dimension of the universe and the laws that work with the big structures fail to explain the quantum phenomenon.

String theory is the best one to come close to the unified law of physics but scientists prefer other theories as well, like loop quantum gravity.

These theories, no matter how promising they might sound mathematical, haven’t made many testable predictions yet. The math works just fine, but for any theory to be accepted as a law, experimental evidence is important.

Expansion of the Universe

It’s a really hard question to answer, because experimentally, as we see the redshift, we could conclude that the galaxies are in fact moving away from each other. The very concept of expansion has to deal with the concept of space.

But if Big Bang was responsible for the creation of time and space itself, then the question of expansion doesn’t carry a lot of weight, because if there is no space outside of this universe, then the question relating to the position doesn’t have any meaning.

There have been several hypotheses like we’re in a multiverse, and when one expands, another contracts, which is an interesting analogy, but remains a theory nevertheless.

Contributed by Rishab Karki and curated by the author.