This is the type of discussions that we can get involved in for the sake of our sanity and I couldn’t agree more.

loved the vid Brett

is a condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects, i.e. non-life, and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally. A physical characteristic of life is that it feeds on negative entropy. In more detail, according to physicists such as John Bernal, Erwin Schrödinger, Wigner, and John Avery, life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form (see: entropy and life).

I agree with you about Bryson’s book. The thing it drove home to me was how flimsy the chances are that life exists at all on this planet and how it could be wiped out at any time by a bunch of different things.

The concept that as you are reading this article at this point in time is due to the sum result of chemical processes that have occurred over 13.7 billion years that originated from a single point of time (The Big Bang) is an interesting notion.

On a sub-atomic point of view, the particles that are currently a part of you must have also existed during the occurrence of the big bang. Currently, with our understanding, all matter is energy vibrating at different frequencies and cannot be destroy, merely transformed. For example, a nuclear explosion does not generate or create energy, it unlocks only a small portion of the uranium or plutonium’s true energy capacity. Humans just aren’t good at releasing it.

If all the atoms (hence energy) in the universe were once at a point of singularity just moments before the big bang occurred, is it indicative that all atoms in the universe were once one and therefore all atoms are “me”?

Unfortunately I don’t think humankind will every unlock all the secrets of the universe because I don’t think the brain sports the capacity. And we will end up dying off as a species anyway.

Some would say that that is where their particular Mr G comes into the picture. The god of the gaps.
But then he always has been a god or gods of “our” gaps even though nearly all the gaps that existed back when we invented them no longer exist today.

A good book to read on this topic is Bill Bryson’s, A Brief History of Nearly Everything.
I know some of the scientific stuff in it s a bit wobbly in places but still it gives pedestrian thinkers like myself a good grasp on what we know and how we came to know it.

The main problem I see with science is its apparent elitism and expertism.
If you don’t have a thorough knowledge of a particular subject then you no right even thinking about it. This is unlike the religions who embrace, even foster ignorance amongst their devotees.

My atheist grandmother once studied theology and she told me that most serious theologists are more aligned with atheists than the devotees of their particular religion.
Keep the flock ignorant so that they’re easier to fleece.

Right angles to right angles; phases, space-time, mesons … all incredibly mind boggling but all makes sense in a very complicated but rationalistic way.

The universe is sprawled across space and time like a massive fractal generated from a single point, and the present is like a comb that’s working it’s way out from that seed. Is there more than one now? Is now only now to us because we’re in it? I’m sitting here in front of this computer now; I was sitting in front of it 5 minutes ago … and according to inductive reasoning I’ll still be sitting in front of this computer in 5 minutes. Is that because the giant comb of the present is here right now or is it also 5 minutes ago and in 5 minutes?

Thanks for ruining my weekend Cam … now I have a headache

If you were to upscale the nucleus of an atom to the size of our sun then the outer most orbital electron would be at twice the distance of Pluto (and pluto is a freaking lot further out than our Primary school atlas’s indicated) BTW electrons don’t really orbit the nucleus like little planets they just exist within a zone of probability.
So within an atom there is probably as much space as there is in space.

Only 7% of our universe is made from matter. The rest is made from antimatter, energy, dark energy or whatever else they can come up with. Its all too hard really. Maybe our problem (my problem)with such concepts lays within our own brains, which themselves are matter, evolved on a planet of matter where matter matters and are therefore designed to only deal with material concepts.

Indeed, every concept we deal with must be somehow converted to within the range of our natural senses and the scope of our stoneage materialist concepts of time and space.

Maybe we can only comprehend what is comprehensible to us.

BTW there really is no I in me.