Who are you? Philosophy:

someon
Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:13:41 +0000

additionally, heaven, that kind of thinking is stifling to human knowledge. Who’s to say that this knowledge cannot be useful in some way? One only needs to look at the history of mathematics to realize that the most useless-seeming fields can sometimes become extremely useful. Linear algebra, for example. Number theory. Group theory. And so on.

Dark matter and energy are predicted to make up 95% of the mass/energy of the universe. There is strong empirical evidence for the existence of both.

Alright, I can see what you are trying to find out. I’m not sure if people will ever come to an intuitive understanding of something without cause because of what you just said: everything appears to have one. We have not experienced anything that cannot be attributed to some cause so some sort of uncaused thing is not part of out “common sense.”

Quantum theory has numerous examples of things that defy common sense. Quantum tunneling and uncertainty are strange. In fact, it is not deterministic. That is, theoretically, if I had, say, a piece of radioactive uranium, each of the atoms has a certain probability of decaying in some specified time interval. Now when a particle decays, there is no apparent thing causing the decay to happen at that particular moment. There seems to be an element of chance. And in fact, there are certain phenomena that have been proven to be just this, uncaused and random. The test used bell’s inequalities if you want to find out more.

Perhaps the folks over at physicsforums.com might be able to answer your questions better. I’m certainly not an expert on the matter.