Xeuton's recent activity
-
Comment on The Music vs. the Moment: On "Criticism" and attempting to get a clear look at Kamasi Washington's 'Heaven and Earth' in ~music
-
Comment on In your opinion, why is there something instead of nothing? in ~talk
Xeuton LinkStarting from physics, the biggest reasoning I can come up with is that there was a fundamental inequity in the universe following the Big Bang. What we call antimatter exists in less quantity...Starting from physics, the biggest reasoning I can come up with is that there was a fundamental inequity in the universe following the Big Bang. What we call antimatter exists in less quantity than what we call matter. This is to say nothing of the unintuitive nature of matter itself. It is not a solid object, so much as a self-perpetuated collection of waves in quantum fields.
Anytime you ask the question why, you are either asking in terms of causality or in terms of significance. If you ask why I decided to get an account on Tildes, I could tell you about it in terms of significance and causality. But when we get into things like physics and the existence of existence itself, there is no accessible meaning-maker to assign significance to anything that exists. Note that I say accessible. If there is some sort of higher consciousness or whatnot that is in control of the fate of the universe, or otherwise responsible for the existence of things, we cannot access them sufficiently to ask or gain answers.
However, we can work our way back causally, which is what we have been doing for the last few centuries, and it is these efforts which have led to our recognition that, in terms of a material universe, there are two major factors involved.
-
the Big Bang happened. Without that happening, we have no way to determine the possibility of anything existing.
-
in this universe that started with the Big Bang, there is a fundamental asymmetry to the quantity of matter and antimatter, for which we have not yet found an explanation. Without that asymmetry, it is widely accepted that all the matter and antimatter in the universe would have run into each other and been annihilated almost immediately. We do not know how this asymmetry came to be, where the antimatter went if it went anywhere, or indeed, whether there is any fundamental aspect of the physics of the universe that led to the asymmetry and would do so again if the Big Bang were repeated. That is the next causal step back, and there are people actively trying to figure out how to experimentally test various hypotheses regarding that next causal step.
-
Definitely seems like that particular video got some kind of freaky favoritism from the YouTube algorithm. Doesn't hurt that the thumbnail is DAMN eye-catching.