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Hi Jeanie

One of the problems that crop up so often here is the idea that some of what science teaches us doesn’t feel right to our common sense. Here’s a classic example.

We have known for some time that the universe is expanding.

Common sense says OK so what’s it expanding into?

Good question but it turns out that the question has no meaning. Space and time are facets of this universe. The distance between any two points in this universe is growing continually but there is nothing outside this universe or at least nothing relevant to this quesiton. Try to get your head around the idea of something that expands like the Tardis on Dr Who (have you ever heard of that show). The outside of his time machine is a telephone box, it’s a constant size yet the inside of the machine is huge. It’s a paradox and common sense is out the window. In the case of the universe we have every reason to believe that it is self contained, there is nothing outside it and it can’t take in or give out anything be it matter or energy. That’s the definition of a closed system. No it doesn’t make sense to our ‘common sense’ because common sense evolved to suite our lifestyles. What use did we have, in ancient times, to be able to understand deep time, billions of years are irrelevant to organisms who live for under 100 years.

What use would it have been to our ancestors to understand quantum physics or relativity or the true scale or age of this universe? The answer is that it would not in any way aid their survival and so there would be no evolutionary driver for such abilities. Most people spent their lives within 100 kilometres of their birth places and even the most widely travelled were confined to this one planet. They were incapable of detecting the micro world of bacteria much less viruses and atoms. They were incapable of detecting the true scale of this universe. These creatures would have no experience what so ever of speeds greater than say 30 kilometers per hour or of gravity other than the constant 1g of earth.

Is it not obvious that a common sense that evolved in such conditions would fail to grasp deep time or quantum scale effects, universal gravitation or relativity? Yet people here continue to suggest that this or that scientific theory must be wrong because it contradicts common sense. Common sense created thunder gods, science dispelled that myth. Common sense gave us a flat earth, science dispelled that myth. Common sense gave us a young earth, science dispelled that myth too.

So many of the ‘issues’ we talk about here are the products of common sense taken beyond its abilities. Science can take us beyond the limits of ‘common sense’ which has clearly been shown to be anything but once it is taken outside the realm it was evolved to cope with.

I know it’s hard to grasp but all the evidence shows us that this universe is self contained. If there is anything ‘outside’ it it can have no influence what so ever on what is inside the universe. This universe is also self contained in time at least into the past. It began at a definite point in the past and nothing that occurred prior to that can have any influence on the properties of the universe after that moment. There is some complex maths and lots of evidence behind each of those statements, way beyond the scope of a thread like this. Can you, just in theory, get your head around a universe that is self contained yet expanding without expanding into anything. A universe that is somewhere around 13.7 billon years old. A universe in which all the matter heavier than helium was produced in massive stars that have long since exploded and died scattering the very material of our bodies into space to coalesce into lumps we call planets and stars.

What does your common sense say about all that Jeanie?

We have coopted minds that were evolved to model a world of middle scale without a micro or a mega scale to it, a world of middle time scales, from seconds to years but not billions of years or picoseconds, a world that is very fixed in it’s behaviour in many ways. It is amazing what we can get our minds to achieve but much of that achievement in science has come through understanding the limitations of our minds and working out how to work beyond or around those limits. Working out how to view the world with scientific tools rather than common sense has been one of the biggest and most important challenges but it has given us so much, it has been worth it.

All the best Jeanie

Russell