WE ARE STARDUST

“The most embarrassing thing is that we think we know but we actually don’t”.

8 min readMar 28, 2022

(Borrowing Elbe040’s title).

Our human perception has woefully boxed in our way.

Insofar as it has acted as a precursor to this world, and our seemingly-unbounded-intelligence — as though we were the most prominent species in this universe; perception has led all the way to the self-realization that there ARE something beyond the bounds of perception.

Something imperceptible, unanticipatable, or even unimaginable.

Akin to an ant getting lost in the middle of a city, humans are rarely heeding what goes beyond us. The most grievous thing is that we, nonetheless, are forevermore purporting that we could, or at least “would”. Indeed, physicists, mathematicians and philosophers have feasted on their own linguistic and conventional systems to somehow rise above the limits, envisaging every imperceptible-to-the-ordinary thing.

Werner Karl Heisenberg, the German theoretical physicist to win the Nobel Prize for “creating quantum mechanics”, once said: “In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language” [1].

Niels Henrik David Bohr, the Danish physicist to conquer the 1922 Physics Prize in 1922, also stated: “If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them” [2].

Of the two aforementioned exceptional minds, Heisenberg, who laid the very ground for the uncertainty principle, claimed that we could never grasp every information of a particle, for it is, straightforwardly enough, impossible. Nevertheless, the principle holds that the inherent wave-particle duality in the universal laws, not our limited capabilities, hems in such a progress.

Heisenberg and Bohr also jointly developed the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) [3] to interpret the meaning of quantum mechanics. On the whole, most of which are counterintuitive — uncertainty and absolute randomness in the quantum world, for example. To put superposition into perspective, CI translates it as: a system always has an unanticipatable superposition of forms, morphing in-between which as the system gets observed.

In conventional parlance, superposition means that as you put a coin in a sealed box, its faces shift between up and down until the box is opened, insofar as the face results are contingent upon your observations (either up or down forever).

Howbeit paradoxical as it might sound.

Given that paradoxicality, the two scientists’ statements did stir up every decadal controversy against their colleagues — Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [4]. Einstein, accordingly argued that “God does not play dice with the universe”, implying that everything can be nailed down forasmuch as we have enough information — thus turning down such an absolute randomness [5].

The most prominent counterargument, however, was Schrodinger’s cat (de facto devised by Schrodinger to evidence the counterintuitive in Copenhagen Interpretation’s statements). To spell out the irrationality of quantum mechanics, he put forward an example, in which a cat was placed in a closed box with a substance capable of producing radioactive (50% probability). After all, given CI’s randomness and indetermination, would the cat be both dying and living once the box got opened?

Bohr replied, indeed, the cat did coevally live and die, pursuant to the former principle.

Later, Hugh Everett, an American physicist, “tailor-made” the phenomenon for our perception by theorizing that the cat’s fate was forevermore superpositioned, yet as soon as someone opened the box and saw it alive, a parallel universe wherein the cat d-i-e-d would be invented. To put it simply, the moment the box gets opened always creates two parallel universes, with a d-e-a-d cat in one, and a living cat in another [6].

After all, however they are interpreted, such interpretations, as a rule, stir up every annoyance among us — for they are de facto counterintuitive — for in turn, we ourselves are thriving on a not-that-unbounded language and information system incapable of reasoning out such a phenomenon. On the other hand, even though physicists do not actually observe all of which, those are inherently laid bare in every precise mathematical formula of theirs.

Thence, we — the ordinary with the main language system used in ordinary discourse, along with the meagre amount of school-taught elementary classical physics — are indeed finding these interpretations any less eccentric. To put it simply, let us think of ourselves as compatible-to-binary-only computers, who, thus, are incompatible to high-level-language science knowledge - which appears straightforwardly enough.

“The most embarrassing thing is that we think we know but we actually don’t”.

We are stardust, brought into being since a cosmic explosion 13.8 billion years ago. Every element constituting life and the human body have been found scattered in space years ago [7]. Thus, there must have been things that prevailed long before humans and our perception.

Why is the speed of light a constant — c? For it is what it is.

Why does matter have wave-particle duality? For it is what it is.

Why is the position of the particle uncertain and superposition taking place at quantum level? For it is what it is.

Why could Schrodinger’s cat coevally get along and drop off? For it is what it is.

What if I could build a spacecraft speeding faster than the speed of light? No, you could not.

How could I imagine a space with 4, 5, or 6 dimensions? Neither could you.

Many a similar cosmic laws have been unveiled as objective truth — until we ferret out more “objectivity”. We, however, are always perceiving which as counterintuitive for as humans, we are discovering them in a humanly biased world.

Trying to put any of which in ordinary discourse, thus, is set to misinterpret the problem’s nature. That said, under formulas and experiments, the consistency in scientific works has evidenced that “if it weren’t what it is, this universe would be meaningless”. It is when everything falls apart. That a formula can be applied to the manufacture of an atomic weapon or quantum computer, yet incapable of expressing the universe’s nature itself is an absurdity.

Our contradiction against scientific claims on which, I reckon, is deep-seated the senile preconception that as humans, we must have been exalted, supreme creatures in a world tailor-made for us.

In all likelihood, it is time we let go of such a self-deception, to string along a more realistic science-unfolded truth that we are purely stardust — dust in the woefully stretched-out-over-our-perception world. After all, such a thought is, in fact, no less interesting.

For example, the next time you converse with your girlfriend, tell her that we are all brought into being by the Big Bang, thus sharing origins with every faraway star. You have both been bred by an almighty explosion, every “gentle touch” of every universal matter within billions years. Show her any star within your vision, and spit it out that she is witnessing something from a thousand light years away. To reach our [meagre] vision, it has travelled past a thousand years, insofar as she is only seeing the past of which [8].

Still, there are quadrillions (7x10²²) similar stars in the universe [9]. The best telescopes humans hold only allows us to observe galaxies of maximum 13.4 billion light years away. Given a star’s average age — a few billion years — it seems set that we are scrutinizing a d-e-a-d star [10]. Another interesting thing — that star is merely hundreds million light years away from the Big Bang.

We could rarely observe any further, for thriving on a 14-billion-year-old universe does, straightforwardly enough, not allow humans to a gap of twenty billion years and further? The time limit has inherently hemmed in our observations of the stars that the light of which could hardly reach us — given our universe’s age.

However, we still have every other intriguing thing: the universe is unceasingly expanding in accordance with the Hubble constant. The closer to the edge of the universe, the faster and further galaxies recede from each other — a galaxy 3.2 million light years (1 megaparsec) away from another recedes at about 500 km/s. In such a manner, by the time we heed the light from a star 13.4 billion years away, which, unless dead, must have been over 46 billion light years away, indeed [11]. Which spells out the fact that each time we notice any seemingly-faraway thing in the universe, it has lived a life long enough to dissolve itself into dust, or drift further toward the universe’s “horizon”.

46 billion light years is also the limit of the visible universe to date. Scientists, however, estimate that the entire universe could be at least 250 times more sizeable than our human visible region [12]. To put it simply, this universe is de facto so gigantic that we [given our human perception] could never interpret.

After all, while humans have grappled with our human limitations since we vaguely heeded the actual triviality of ours, the universe is expanding even faster than the speed of light [13]. As soon as we are about to reach out, everything slips even further away.

Dismally enough, many theories even suggest that there exists every other universe out there, and that seemingly Brobdingnagian series of universes are purely drops in the ocean — on some planets, of some other universes [14]. It is not to mention every hypothesis of parallel universes — that there are countless universes, infinite number of cases, insofar as every possible event has unveiled [15]. A universe where you are “this” inferior, or “not that” meagre.

Nevertheless, every imperceptible thing to us, I reckon, is of, if any, little importance in experiencing a life of every perceptible thing. To perceive the vastness of the universe, after all, should lead all the way to the ultimate exaltation of our human existence and self-actualization. To long for a “trip” by the universe’s horizon at least once in a lifetime can spearhead desperation for our limitations, or at best, drug use.

The only notable thing is that we are unmindful of many a thing, woefully heedless of every other thing we are yet to put in any effort. And we should not distress ourselves about such a fact.

The most dismal thing, instead, lies in the fact that we always reckon that we somehow deserve enlightenment without even a drop of sincerity, and that we act as though we do know everything.

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References:

[1] https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/.../Hei.../quotations/

[2] https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/.../Boh.../quotations/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox

[5] https://aeon.co/.../what-einstein-meant-by-god-does-not...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

[7] https://www.newscientist.com/.../2090696-building-blocks.../

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/.../the-building-blocks.../

https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-has-detected-the...

[8] https://www.space.com/34165-see-distant-past-with-mobile...