Scientific Mysteries

[Extollager]

I'm intrigued by the not widely known fact that one may be intelligent and functional with almost no brain.

Where are you?

"There's a young student at this university," neurologist Professor John Lorber of Sheffield University told Science magazine in December 1980, "who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain."

www.theguardian.com

 

[LordOfWizards]

I wouldn't say that time did not exist before the big bang. I would say that the big bang, as a model, tells me that the extrapolation of our current state backwards must stop at some point. At that point I cannot say with any certitude what 'came before' or even if there was a before. (I'm pretty sure Hawking and others say approximately the same.)

I agree that time as a concept does not require space. The question becomes - If nothing exists, is time still there?
Well, yes but time is simply meaningless at that point.

It is the extrapolation of the Big bang that VB refers to here that causes our perception of what I call 'Deep time'. Once we noticed that light has a speed limit, we understood that light tells the story of the universe' past. Because the older the light, the longer it took to get here. So we use logic and math to extrapolate how far back it goes. The idea of seeing anything before the big bang seems monumentally preposterous since the theory suggests the pressures were so high as to prevent any particles (electrons, quarks, protons, atoms) from existing until things cooled and expanded.

It may be that we are so biased by being human that we just don't get it. Do we think there has to be cause and effect because everything behaves that way now? The idea that something simply blinks into existence without cause makes no sense to us. And the concept of eternity is really hard for a finite creature.

 

[Harpo]

Here’s a new one

Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe baffle scientists

A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

www.eurekalert.org

 

[Robert Zwilling]

We're trying to use the past to explain the present, but it's not cooperating.

 

[Extollager]

Another problem to write to one's Congressional or Parliamentary representative about.

 

[Montero]

I'm intrigued by the not widely known fact that one may be intelligent and functional with almost no brain.

Where are you?

"There's a young student at this university," neurologist Professor John Lorber of Sheffield University told Science magazine in December 1980, "who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain."

www.theguardian.com

That is a fascinating article especially about sense of self possibly being in neuropeptides.