The Compelling Truth of the Universe
I'm really trying to make a point here. I'm not trying to go on a religious rant. Most people alive today and even in the history of personkind, have asked this fundamental question, "Where did it all come from?" If you have studied Science or even just observed the natural world, there is so much to the word "all." We aren't talking about the Earth and the World, People and Cities. We are also talking about Music, Mathematics, Language, Biology, Atoms, Computer Science. There are so many details and so much Truth to discover in the word, "all" in the question, "Where did it all come from?" Like Bertrand Russell writes about in "The History of Western Philosophy" That the Nile River would flood on a certain day of the year. So ancient people who studied the stars and made the first calendars, could tell farmers to plant all their crops and use all their stored seeds by a certain day, before the Nile River would flood. Back then, if you planted too early, you seeds would dry out and die. If you planted too late, your crops wouldn't come to harvest before the first of winter. It was a type of magic that eventually became agriculture and science. Even if these ancient stargazers would have tried to explain how they created a calendar with days, months, season, cycles, still those people would see it as magic and not as part of the "all" that is evidence of the detail and complexity of the world. Most people in the world, and throughout time, are stressed out by this question being unanswered. In a way, Scientist challenge themselves to hold onto that stress and anxiety of not knowing the answers. Most people can't hold onto this anxiety and seek a simple and inaccurate answer. "Where did it all come from?" Some find comfort in saying God made it all. This is a powerful belief that offers closure. It may offer closure but it also risks halting deeper inquiry. It takes a lifetime of effort to answer the unknown and just a moment to say that god made all of it. This stops most people from asking or probing for more resolution, more detail, more explanation to the natural follow-up question, "What is the nature of god?" Only scientists would pose this question in this way. Most people would say, "Well then, who created god?" which is kind of the same question, whoever created god, must have designed his nature. Most people believe that god has always existed. This belief is unprovable. But more importantly, it's a paradox, much like the universe itself. One of the natures of the universe is that it's paradoxical, we find paradoxes throughout this concept of "all." It's these paradoxes that I find to be the most compelling and truth aspect of the Universe, the reason I write this blog, the reason I get out of bed every day. I'm writing my own BigInt class and I'm testing by calculating the square root of 2 to more than 6,000 digits. With computers, this is a trivial thing. Before computers, there are books in ancient libraries, where monks calculated 5, 6, even 7 or more digits of the square root of two. This is part of the "all" that exists when you ask, "Where did it all come from?" It's this part of the "all" that has roots in "transcendentalism." We can calculate, to more and more precision, the digits of irrational numbers. We can say, "Where did it come from?" and the answer is "We don't know." and then follow it up with, "How much of it, can we know?" and we can get 5, 6, even 7 digits out of infinity, but we don't stop there. We build computers, and we build better algorithms, and we can get millions of digits of precision. We just can never get to god. No matter how hard we try, we will always fall short of infinity. And this is not to say that we should give up and just answer the question that god did it. No, Answering the question with an absolute is unfair to the nature of the universe which is paradoxical, infinite, and transcendental by nature. I want to answer the question, "Where did it all come from?" with "We may never know but we can always try to learn more."