The Metaphysical

About 2 years ago I read a book by Brian Greene called The Elegant Universe. It was a book about the phyiscal nature of our universe and the advancements of a relatively new "theory of everything" known as String Theory. I can't tell you what made me decide to read the book, only that I had a small interest in physics and math and possibly a lot of bordem. But before I even got half way through it, I knew I had found my new obsession.

The Elegant Universe is a beautifully written book. It's scientific writing at it's finest, not overly technical, but it does not insult your intellegence. It's not for laymen and those that know nothing of science, but it's not for PHD's or MIT grads either. This book, in many ways, changed my life. It changed my viewpoint about the universe and my place in it in a deeply philosophical way.

As a person that isn't too keen on religion and all the weirdness that comes with it, I had never spent much time worrying about "The Truth". When I refer to "The Truth" I'm talking about the true nature of our universe. What is existance? What is life? What is the driving force behind everything? How did we get here? What is knowledge?. These are the kind of questions that many people turn to various religions to figure out. Because I'm not very religious, I was often to caught up in monotony of my own life to worry about these kind of questions. I was aware of them, but I never bothered to ask myself them, and seek to answer them.

The Elegant Universe isn't a book that is nessicarily addresses those questions, but it's nearly impossible to talk about the true nature of the universe and the study of physics without these philisophical questions bubbling to the surface. So being the logical, rational thinker that I tend to be, when I came across this mathmatical, experimental, and logical way of discovering "The Truth", it blew me away. Theoretcial Physics and the study of the true nature of the universe became my new religion instantaneously.

I believe in science. I believe in our ability as human beings to decipher and analyize the secrets of this world and beyond. It's funny to me how even as a kid I always equated science with truth and always had questions about religion (which was Roman Catholisim). Some people have that one moment in their lives where they can pin point the beginning of their belief system, or morality or ethics. Well, that never seemed to happen to me. I wasn't brought up to be overly religious, to take the gospel as truth, and I spent many years of my life simply uninterested in the grand old questions that many people seek to find.

That all changed the day I read The Elegent Universe. What I love about science is that nothing is written in stone. Ideas and concepts that seem to be emperically true, or intuitiviely true are often times proved to be only part of a greater truth, and a deeper understanding is necissary.

The best example that I can give is Newton's Laws and Einstiens Theories of Relativity. Newton's laws of physics were based on a unchanging, stable background of space and time. This was thought to be the true nature of the universe until Eienstien came along and totally upended the idea of an unchanging space and time. He found that space and time are all relative to the observer and space can shrink and stretch just as time can slow down or speed up. Eienstien discovered that we indeed lived in a very volitile universe, which was completely different to Newton's viewpoint.

I also love that so much of what we know about the universe is completely counter intuitive. It's amazing to me that we are wired to view the universe in a certain way, but the true nature of that universe is almost completely different then our everyday experiences. What does that say about who we are as an intellegent life form on this planet? Why and how were we given the ability to reach beyond what our senses tell us about the universe and use mathmatics and technology to understand what is really behind the nature of reality? It's these kind of questions that really got me into the philisophical side of science.