Is this mind boggling to you too?

Question

Eery once in a while, I will watch some show on national geographic or discovery about worm holes and cosmos and black holes and galaxies and space in general. I'm ok for about 10 minutes but as soon as I REALLY start trying to understand and think about it I like literally physically can't make myself think about it. It's literally mind boggling to me that a) we even know anything about these things b) do we really know about it or is it made up and c) are these thigs even real? How can something real be so incredibly confusing to me situation I can't understand at all? Am I alone in this or are there others out there who simply can't comprehend it and just decide to sort of accept t but at the same time not really?

Answer 1

If it is any comfort to you, even those of us working in the field find our minds boggled consistently. However, it should be born in mind that everything can be taken a step at a time. This allows us to break down a problem into smaller parts and makes it easier to understand it. Sudden flashes of insight are actually quite rare and when they do occur, we often call it genius. TV shows aren't always a great source of information. They are subject to editing because of running times etc., and are often edited by experts in TV and not experts in the subject matter.

Answer 2

we _not_ only know by reasoning, also by observing.

Einstein figured in 1936 that blackholes or large galaxies could serve also as gravitational lenses, but then thought that it must be so rare that we will probably never see it. He underestimated observers.



Anyhow, things can be mind-boggling indeed, (what happens below the event horizon, etc...) However, mostly things are mind-boggling when you are confronted with many strange phenomena as a whole. But if you try to break these large strange things in many separate 'understandable' tiny strange things, you get a grip on the mind-boggle effect. This is what the scientific method also tries to do.



Also 'mind-boggling' things are not a 'negative' thing. I see them as 'true wonders' that make me curious. But I always stay curious how the trick of the magician actually works. How much we would like to know it all, nature itself has things that are extremely difficult to understand. That creates a lot of questions that you can't even ask (for having an 'easy' answer) You see those questions asked here all the time. Like 'what happened before the big bang', etc...)

Answer 3

The next generation of kids will have to be thought to use "cosmic scale" numbers in the forms of "powers". Imagining things on a cosmic scale takes years of understanding. Because tec is advancing to the point where space has become something more "tangible" schools will need to take this step at grades like 2nd or 3rd. Example: 1,000,000,001+1 is just as easy as 1+1 but it trains the mind better for larger numbers..

Answer 4

We know these things only through a long and complicated line of reasoning. Sometimes the reasoning turns out to be wrong. Then new theories replace old ones. As time goes on the bad reasoning gets disproved leaving only the correct ones, and human knowledge increases. But it IS pretty esoteric stuff.