Melanie Esparza Week 8

It was very interesting to read Robert Lanza’s piece “The American Scholar: A New Theory of the Universe” because it deals with some of the most complicated questions I’ve ever asked. From the time we are born, we are taught that time flows forward, and there is no way to go back or forward. Similarly, we are taught that we can not travel in space. I didn’t really start questioning any of this until I came to college and took a class in astronomy. In this class, we went into depth into the big bang theory and it’s always felt like an incomplete equation. Scientists theorize that there was a random bang that created this universe, but how can that be explained. How can the universe be infinitely expanding with no source of energy or perturbation to have caused this? Moreover, how is it that such perfect conditions were met such as those required for life on Earth? Robert mentions that there are at least 200 very specific parameters within our solar system alone that are necessary for life as it is. Scientific theory assumes this to be random, but it’s such a leap from everything else which must always be quantified. Robert describes that time and space are relative to ourselves and what we have been told. This makes perfect sense when you consider that our reality truly is just our perception of it. We already know that our eyes are only capable of seeing within a certain range of wavelengths and our ears are limited to certain frequencies. There is a lot that we are not hearing and seeing. Perhaps there is more that we are not feeling either. A human’s reality will be very different from a fly’s reality, but they are both just as real and unreal. We are used to viewing the world through an anthropocentric lens, but that limits our perception.



Source: Tabatha Riley. August 16 2009.