How Much More Can We Learn About the Universe?

I&#x27;m curious how many people think about the Universe and how frequently. I think about it all the time and I&#x27;m not a physicist. Probably a solid 30 minutes a day usually before falling asleep. Almost religiously (ironic).<p>I have tried to talk about it with my family and friends but so many of them just don&#x27;t seem to have the passion for it. Some times I feel even seriously guilty wasting so much energy thinking&#x2F;reading about it. Sometimes even wondering if I&#x27;m even in right profession (even though I do love technology).<p>My current theory is that it just my personality type (INTP).

Some of the great developments of th 20th century were proofs of limits, of what cannot be achieved even in principle: for example the incompleteness theorem and halting problem, and the uncertainty principle.<p>IMHO, there is an &quot;abstraction boundary&quot; that limits what humans can ever know even in principle. There are some phenomena that are inherently &quot;unabstractable&quot;. We may know that a glass of water has a wave function, but we will never know the particular wave function of any glass of water ever.<p>The phenomena in our universe that we can &quot;understand&quot; are those that can be modeled, those for which abstractions can be created that will fit in our brains. There may well be phenomena in the universe (or elsewhere) that are not amenable to modeling in any way that is compatible with human cognitive machinery.

Maybe someone can chip in here but I was under the impression virtual particles didn&#x27;t actually exist, they were just used to simplify our understanding of particle interactions.<p><i>The uncertainty principle hasn’t gotten in the way of learning the rules of quantum mechanics, understanding the behavior of atoms, or discovering that so-called virtual particles, which we can never see directly, nevertheless exist.</i><p>After recently getting to grips with QFT it seems there aren&#x27;t actually any particles, just fields which are excited at certain locations giving the impression of particles.

There was a time (just over a hundred years ago) when people thought that there was nothing more to learn about the universe. There were just these two little problems that needed explained...<p>Now, that was because they thought they understood everything there was to know, not because they worried that there were limits beyond which they could not know. But, as the article says, trying to guess how much we will learn (or not learn) in the next, say, 100 years, is a very hazardous business.

Glad to hear about testing for gravitational waves. That&#x27;s really the first observation I have heard about that covers anything older than the cosmic microwave background radiation.<p>Otherwise, who is to say that the universe <i>didn&#x27;t</i> start out as a somewhat lumpy (not too much, not tool little) blob of gas measured with a few K&#x27;s (thousands of kilometers across and a few thousand&#x2F;million degrees Kelvin -- k of Km x k of K)? You can run the numbers back to a geometric point, but what would that even mean without observations of some kind to prove or disprove it?

Anyone know what galaxies are in the &quot;Colliding Galaxies&quot; image?

No. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a>