Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
The reason I find steady state comfortable is infinity needs little explanation if any.
I find inflation difficult to accept so avoiding it in the mix appeals to me.
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There are many concepts in modern cosmology and quantum mechanics which relate to the very big and the very small that my brain simply cannot grasp - yet I still accept them as being (almost certainly) true.
The human brain evolved to deal with human-scale problems like sabre-toothed tigers and rivers and mountains, but there was no evolutionary imperative to develop a brain which can truly understand and visualise fundamental particles, wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement, or finite-but-unbounded n-dimensional space-time.
Analogies such as an inflating balloon or the raisins in an expanding plum pudding help, and I get that "Ah-Hah!" moment when I think I "get it", but that is always followed by a crashing disappointment when my 3-dimensional brain puts the balloon or pudding into the physical context of my larger universe, where I can sit god-like outside the balloon / pudding and see its boundaries, and also what lies outside it. Somehow, my brain can't do the reverse, and put itself inside the pudding, or on the surface of the balloon, and accept that there is no "outside".
I often wonder whether the people who develop these theoretical frameworks can somehow truly "see" in their mind's eye what an n-dimensional hyper-surface looks like, or are they limited by the same limited 3-dimensional visualisation, and a mathematical model of n-dimensions?