Caturday’s Astrophenia | Cosmic Conundrums

G’day! I’m still working on getting things done before returning to a steady blogging schedule, and it’s coming along nicely so far. On the Bengali front, I’m improving my working vocabulary and revising on previous study material. I’m creating notes, virtual flashcards and hand-drawn physical flashcards as study aids, and developing mnemonics for script and grammatical features.

‘So it goes,’ to quote Kurt Vonnegut…

Also, below, I’ve a video featuring cosmologist Sean Carroll on “Did the Universe Begin?” who discusses that very question, what we do and what we don’t currently know, still not fully settled by science despite what some apologists for Old-Earth creationism would have you believe.

At around 1:20 Dr. Carroll mentions that General Relativity is wrong, and I believe he means in the sense that while accurate as far as it goes in describing the universe, it is also inconsistent with certain experimentally verified predictions of Quantum Mechanics, and vice versa.

And so both are incomplete as theories, requiring a mature and as yet undiscovered theory of Quantum Gravity to reconcile and complement both of them. There are currently candidates for this new ‘Theory of Almost Everything,’ including versions of String Theory, but it is unknown which if any of them is the most likely correct description of the universe’s workings.

So, whether the universe had a beginning is still an open question, even in cosmology, as the full meaning and implications of the Big Bang are not fully understood even by those most qualified to know.

And when those most qualified to know are uncertain, it’s best to be intellectually humble, lest presumption and pretense to knowledge exact their terrible tolls of deceit and self-delusion…

Tf.Tk.Tts.