Cosmology- who is not overwhelmed by its study?

Question

All the work that has been done since Einstein in Cosmology is mind-blowing. How can anyone conceptualize the vast amounts of space and time and make sense out of it? I know that many cosmologists, themselves have reacted viscerally to new discoveries and have the same difficulty I have. But what keeps them on track? Is it the mathematical formulas that they develop that can keep them grounded? Or are they stumbling blindly through their work? I find cosmology and quantum physics fascinating, but I often get lost because their ideas and theories are so unfamiliar. What do you think?

Bradschum, yeah! the string theory seems to answer a lot of questions, but trying to grasp the concepts of all you mention gives me a queasy stomach!

Answer 1

It's overwhelming for ALL involved...not even Einstein was able to link it into quantum mechanics....the holy grail of modern physics would be to come up with a theory that makes cosmology and quantum mechanics compatible with each other, and we're still working on that. String-theory seems to be the most likely answer (Hawking's "baby"), but it's not proven yet. We need to come up with a working theory of Quantum Gravity...that should answer the missing elements of both General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Grasping some of these concepts can be like a religious experience when you get to the core of what some of them mean. Like, how can a single electron manage to simultaniously pass through TWO DIFFERENT SLITS in a partition???...that would be like you or me attempting to walk through two different doors at the same time!!!
And the concept of extra dimensions...it's hard enough trying to figure geometry with just the THREE dimensions of LxWxH, let alone adding a FOURTH into it (or TEN, as String Theory suggests)!

Answer 2

hahaha, i was talking to a friend about this yeseterday.
the deal is that the human mind is really bad about thinking at things that big. like, after ten thousand or so, our minds just kind of treat all the numbers the same. After a few hundred kilometers, our minds treat all distances the same...

so yeah. how do they do it?
mathematics.

it's kind of like an abbacus. you know? a way to represent the things you want to keep in mind, but can't keep in your head all-at-once. once you've got everything represented by positions of beads-on-wires, you can focus on properly manipulating the beads, and then once you're finished, you can interpret the final positions of the beads without having to do all the complicated thinking!

modern mathematics in physics is a lot the same. we've taught ourselves to use math as a way to represent our ideas, and we've taught ourselves to manipulate the mathematics in a way consistent with the rules of the world.

so cosmologists don't actually need to THINK about the huge mind-blowing scales when they're doing their work. they just need to think about how to plug the world they understand into the math, and then how to manipulate the mathematics correctly, and then once that's all done, they can interpret the results of the mathematics!

just like an abacus!

that's the trick, anyway.

Answer 3

Yes, math is the answer, once you have the math down pat it all becomes clear, you begin to use powers of 10 to describe structures and spaces, formulas look like old friends. Math grounds you in the reality of the Universe and it all makes sense.

Answer 4

They use math. You cannot understand this stuff intuitively, it takes math. A billion light years means nothing to our common sense, you have to do the math. Did I say math? Yes, it is all about math. Plus, I think they are blindly stumbling around. Maybe they will stumble on the truth and maybe not.

Answer 5

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