Of course. I spoke with tongue in cheek and referring to that seemingly - and increasingly - faulty universe as opposed to whatever universe we actually witness. It's the cooperating universe - if you'll permit me repeating myself - that bears exploring.webolife wrote:I would like to look at this article a little different way. Once you get past the journalist headlining, and the presumptive dribble of the introduction paragraphs, the writer actually captures the truly tentative nature of honest scientific inquiry. A questioning of assumptions about the data.The open admission that we don't really "know" what we thought we did. The relentless pursuit of a better theory. The insightful look into how actual scientists feel about the mysteries they are trying to come to grips with. With this honest approach, the universe DOES cooperate!
Yes and no. What exists exists but what exists also has a relationship to itself, a paradoxical state as I see it because that relative existence calls for an underlying frame or mode of sub- or extra-state communication and agreement. Whether that's aether or Higgs or what have you, the element that it seems to me at least that resists discovery - probably because it's logically impossible - is that sub-state that ties all states together, whether as an accepted Force on the very small end or as a guiding aspect of cosmology on the big end (both of which being articles of faith as much as material conditions).webolife wrote:What exists exists, and that is right now.
In other words, how can there be a single relationship - the spinning ice skater and the universe that lends her substance and inertia - w/o what amounts to an undiscoverable instantaneous ephemeral matrix, whether between the related subatomics or the simple large scale Newtonian physics.
That's why I got such a kick - as I'm sure many of us did - when the Higgs turned out to more or less disprove both kinds of universes. The weight was wrong, as if, with all deference to MM in this thread, the metaphysical G-d of the God Particle chuckled momentarily and went back to His work, pleased at the sheer conundrum of it all. (I suspect crawler has the right of it but aside from thinking about it metaphysically, that's beyond my grade...)
But hypothesizing an aether fixes it. In point of logical fact, it's probably the only thing that can.webolife wrote:Hypothesizing an undetectable aether that wisps in and out of existence does not solve this problem.