Is majority of universe not able to be sensed by us?

[Jim_Baur]

Is the majority of the universe unable to be sensed by us?

I am sorry about he poorly phrased question.

From dark matter to dark energy to the fundamental parts of the atom, are all of these beings beyond our five external senses to sense?

Furthermore, at what level of beings are we able to sense? Can we with microscopes see individual atoms? Can we with microscopes see the subatomic particles?

Do we know of there existence only through evidence and not directly?

This information is for my own knowledge, I am here to learn.

Thanks!

 

[starsmurf]

Is the majority of the universe unable to be sensed by us?

I am sorry about he poorly phrased question.

From dark matter to dark energy to the fundamental parts of the atom, are all of these beings beyond our five external senses to sense?

Furthermore, at what level of beings are we able to sense? Can we with microscopes see individual atoms? Can we with microscopes see the subatomic particles?

Do we know of there existence only through evidence and not directly?

This information is for my own knowledge, I am here to learn.

Thanks!

We can only “sense” about 4% of the universe, the proportion of it made from matter. We cannot see dark matter or dark energy, we can however see their effects.

We can’t use a microscope to see things like subatomic particles because of something called the uncertainty principle. The universe will not allow you to be really exact about both the position and momentum of an atom or subatomic particle. Also there is the problem of how to see it. To see something in visible light, it has to be larger than the wavelength of the light.

We may not have seen atoms with our eyes but there is direct evidence for their existance. One of Einstien’s famous three papers, that were published in the same edition of a science journal, was giving proof that atoms existed. For many years, something called Brownian motion puzzled scientists, it was first noticed when a tiny pollen grain in water was examined under a microscope. No matter how long it was given for the water to become still, the pollen grain would “dance about” with a random, unpredictable motion. Einstien explained that this was due to the atoms in the water boucing off the pollen grain, giving it lots of little “kicks” and causing the random motion. Just as with dark matter and dark energy, you cannot see the thing itself but you know it is there because of the effects. Hence the time I nearly gave my priest a heart attack by saying “I think God is like dark matter…” He still laughs about it.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

I’m not physicist, but I think the actual existence of dark matter and especially dark energy is still open to debate. Do these things really exist, or is it just that our understanding of physics is incomplete/flawed and these things are just something we’ve imagined up to make the universe fit our theories?

In any case, ultimately at the end of the day the only way we can know anything about the physical world is by our senses. The thing is we can learn things with our senses in a sort of indirect way, through things like scientific instruments that are detectable to our senses and which act in ways which can help us learn about something we cannot sense directly. A really simplistic example would be if it were dark or you were blind and you used a stick to feel out in front of you, and in that way encountered a wall. While you touch it with the stick you can’t see or even directly feel the wall itself, but it’s still ultimately through your senses that you know the wall is there. That’s why even though we can’t see individual atoms much less dark matter or dark energy (if they exist) they are still ultimately parts of the phenomenal world- the world that appears to our senses. Or if they don’t exist then it is like the blind man with a stick who thinks it’s a wall in front of him, but it’s really the base of a giant statue or something and he’s as yet unable to discern this.

 

[Jim_Baur]

To the both of you: THANKS!!!

I am willing to read more, too.

 

[Jim_Baur]

Is it possible that those really small entities are immaterial?

Is it possible that the dark matter and energy is immaterial?

Thanks!

Oh, the reasons that I am asking this is philosophical.

Thanks!:extrahappy:

 

[starsmurf]

Is it possible that those really small entities are immaterial?

Is it possible that the dark matter and energy is immaterial?

Thanks!

By immaterial I’m assuming you mean they are not matter. Or do you mean that they don’t exist and we need to find another explanation for them?

The subatomic particles are “matter” itself. As I said, we know atoms are there because they give a kick to the pollen grain. We know that the particles that make up the atom are there, because we see even tinier particles bouncing off them when we fire them at an atom. We may not be able to take a photograph of them directly but we can see their effects. The closest I can got to a picture of a subatomic particle is the bubble chamber photos, showing the path the particles take. You can see some here teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/BCwebsite/index.htm

Dark matter and dark energy are not made from atoms. Dark energy is energy, not matter either dark or normal. Dark matter seems to be made of something different to the matter around us, as it doesn’t interact with normal matter very much. We are only just getting to grips with dark matter, it is a fairly recent discovery.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three astrophysicists who made the measurements that first showed that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, not slowing down, this was the thing that told us dark energy existed.

 

[starsmurf]

I’m not physicist, but I think the actual existence of dark matter and especially dark energy is still open to debate. Do these things really exist, or is it just that our understanding of physics is incomplete/flawed and these things are just something we’ve imagined up to make the universe fit our theories?

In any case, ultimately at the end of the day the only way we can know anything about the physical world is by our senses. The thing is we can learn things with our senses in a sort of indirect way, through things like scientific instruments that are detectable to our senses and which act in ways which can help us learn about something we cannot sense directly. A really simplistic example would be if it were dark or you were blind and you used a stick to feel out in front of you, and in that way encountered a wall. While you touch it with the stick you can’t see or even directly feel the wall itself, but it’s still ultimately through your senses that you know the wall is there. That’s why even though we can’t see individual atoms much less dark matter or dark energy (if they exist) they are still ultimately parts of the phenomenal world- the world that appears to our senses. Or if they don’t exist then it is like the blind man with a stick who thinks it’s a wall in front of him, but it’s really the base of a giant statue or something and he’s as yet unable to discern this.

Well the Nobel Prize committee doesn’t think dark energy is something we’ve imagined, as they have awarded the prize in physics to three of the astrophysicists who made the original disccovery of it. They were in different teams, and others put their results to the test and came up with the same answer. That’s how physics, and all science, works. We have come up with tests to find if dark matter and dark energy do exist, and they have passed the tests so far. We will keep testing though, and if we find something that shows our ideas are incorrect, we will modify or discard the theory. Something is affecting the universe on a large scale, affecting the rotation of galaxies in a way that replicates dark matter. Something is making the expansion of the universe speed up, we call that dark energy.

Our understanding is not complete and could be flawed, but that it why we keep testing our theories, finding new and more accurate ways of finding out if a particular theory is correct. We’ve just had a spacecraft doing an extremely accurate test of Einstien’s General Theory of Relativity, almost a century after it was first proposed.

Your blind man analogy assumes that you stop when you feel something hit the stick and don’t investigate further. It also assumes that a wall and the base of a statue feel the same through the stick. Science doesn’t feel the thud, say it’s a wall and leave it at that. It would poke the stick in different places to find where the thing was and wasn’t. At first, you might not be able to say it is a statue, but you could say it wasn’t a wall. The more you test, the better a picture of the statue you would get. Science never stops poking the stick, getting a more and more exact picture of the statue.

 

[babylonsfalling]

Is the majority of the universe unable to be sensed by us?

I am sorry about he poorly phrased question.

From dark matter to dark energy to the fundamental parts of the atom, are all of these beings beyond our five external senses to sense?

Furthermore, at what level of beings are we able to sense? Can we with microscopes see individual atoms? Can we with microscopes see the subatomic particles?

Do we know of there existence only through evidence and not directly?

This information is for my own knowledge, I am here to learn.

Thanks!

I think it’s a greatly phrased question.
And I suspect that what we don’t know about the totality of God’s universe greatly dwarfs what we do know.
In our fallen, carnal state I think we’re blinded to much larger spiritual realities.

 

[fakename]

It’s true that the whole of the physical universe can be sensed by us, because whatever is finite is sensible, and the whole universe is finite (since it is capable of change) so therefore it is sensible in principle.

 

[Jim_Baur]

When I said immaterial I mean not-material.

I trust that the subatomic particles are real.

I trust that there is dark energy and matter.

I believe that they exists.

It is the essence of these beings that interest me.

How many properties and functions do we know?

How many properties and function do we not know?

It is the answer to the last question that is going to give us much more light, intellectual light.

Again, thanks!!!

 

[starsmurf]

When I said immaterial I mean not-material.

I trust that the subatomic particles are real.

I trust that there is dark energy and matter.

I believe that they exists.

It is the essence of these beings that interest me.

How many properties and functions do we know?

How many properties and function do we not know?

It is the answer to the last question that is going to give us much more light, intellectual light.

Again, thanks!!!

The subatomic particles are various and numerous. There is a story of a famous particle physicist being asked by a student what the name of the particle formed in a particular way was. The physicist replied “Young man, if I could remember all those names, I would have become a botanist”.

The most fundamental particles that we have found are listed here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_particles

We have found all the particles in the Standard Model, the theory that we have about subatomic particles and how they function, apart from the Higgs Boson. The search for that is at a very exciting stage with the possibility of it being found very soon, hopefully at CERN. For things like quarks and leptons (see the link above) we know their charge, their masses and other properties.

What don’t we know? Well there are other particles that may or may not exist, we are still looking for them. If we don’t find the Higgs Boson soon, then it doesn’t exist and that will upset the whole Standard Model, so we’ll be doing a lot of re-writing of textbooks if that happens! We also don’t know if quarks, leptons and the rest are the fundamental particles or if they themselves are made up of still smaller particles. One of the current ideas being investigated is “string theory” where these particles are the product of ten-dimensional vibrating “strings”. If you want to know more about it, try the Wikipedia article on it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory (disclaimer: the author of this post accepts no responsibility for feelings of utter confusion, spontaneous head-shaking or melting of the brain that may result from reading about M-theory and its related subjects). There is no danger of all the questions in particle physics being answered anytime soon.

It is a pleasure to answer such intelligent questions, if we all asked questions then I believe that there would be less conflict in the world. We get intellectual light from questioning. Scientists are always asking questions. When astronomers send a spaceprobe to another planet in our solar system, we don’t just hope to get answers to our questions, we hope to get new questions (and the answers too if we’re lucky!).

 

[Jim_Baur]

Thanks!

Further ideas?