section 5 of Chapter 2:

Human difficulties: our biased mind

Copyright Raimondo Ballisti, November 2020

    Human kind was always struggling for survival and thus always had the necessity of having a "goal" for every action done.
    In fact, actions require energy, and for survival it is better not to waste it. Thus we always ask ourselves what is the goal of every action, even of nature. And this is wrong! Nature does not have any goal: it is just energy which transforms following the rules of physics.
    Nature is seeking for stable states, thus transforming energy in a way that it creates stables configurations in which energy is bounded.
    But to think like this is very difficult for humans, because we are used to have a goal for every action which requires (our) energy.
    And as we cannot see any goal in what happens in nature, there is the tendency to imagine some goal, so that we reach our peace of mind.
    But this opens the door to a lot of imaginary thales ...

    I get more and more convinced that we all have huge difficulties in trying of NOT project our daily experiences into the understanding of our universe.
    I discovered one of those cases when I was discussing about the Big Bang.
    It came out that people really think of an explosion as you see in some modern films: a Big Bang with an intense flash of light and a pressure wave. But this is completely wrong! At the moment of the Big Bang the three-dimensional universe as we know it today did not yet existed!! Einstein did show that energy can be transformed into matter, and matter in order to exists need a space to be "in".
    At the very moment of the big bang no space were there.
    The huge amount of energy started to build matter, and in doing this "created" the space, which in the very beginning "expanded", but not "into" something pre-existent (which did not exists), but instead in creating itself. Again the best representation of what happened is to think of the surface of a balloon (a sphere) which increases its radius. Imagine our three dimensional space as being only two-dimensional on the surface of the balloon: as the radius of the sphere increases, every point of the surface diverges from all others. But not for the same reason as in one of "our" usual explosions: not because of the kinetic energy given as in a "usual" explosion, but because of the expansion of the "space" itself.
    Well, all the above was only to show that we have difficulties to think in a different way as our daily experience would suggest. We should be aware that our mind try to build a model of our environment and a model of behaviour for every being around us. It does this in order to make a simulation of what could happen in the next few seconds: this was necessary for our survival in the pre-historic time, and is still necessary today, if you want to avoid to be roll-over by a bike or by a car ...
    Sorry! Work in progress ...
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