Feb 1, 2011: A Small Essay
Read this report today, didn't check out the actual arXiv paper. The arXiv blog had this report on a new paper that employed a Bayesian statistical test on all the models that could possibly describe the universe and took into account many of the accepted observations to date. From the arXiv blog: "Bayesian model averaging automatically guards against this. Instead of asking how well the model fits the data, its asks a different question: given the data, how likely is the model to be correct. This approach is automatically biased against complex models--it's a kind of statistical Occam's razor."The Universe whose light has made its way to Earth, the "visible Universe," is 90 billion light years across. However, this study finds that based on all the available information, the Universe is at least 250 times larger than the visible Universe. The nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is two million light years away. The nearest star, proxima centauri, about four light years travel.
When I think about these things, my mind often wanders to slogans I've heard from politicians, army and fraternity recruiters, and preachers. We are truly part of something bigger than ourselves. In fact it is so big that we are physically insignificant, and it seems that one consequence of human progress is to repeatedly discover that we are relatively smaller than we once thought.
Yet, if we consider that the mind extends beyond our bodies, which I certainly believe it does, look at hard drives that extend our memory and computer processors that compute faster than we ever could and the collective human consciousness as concrete examples, then we can conclude that we are in fact enlarging ourselves as we discover new realms of the cosmos.
Coincidentally I just watched this Cosmos video, The Edge of Forever. We need another shaman scientist.
