Semantic Stopsigns
And the child asked:
Q: Where did this rock come from?
A: I chipped it off the big boulder, at the center of the village.
Q: Where did the boulder come from?
A: It probably rolled off the huge mountain that towers over our village.
Q: Where did the mountain come from?
A: The same place as all stone: it is the bones of Ymir, the primordial giant.
Q: Where did the primordial giant, Ymir, come from?
A: From the great abyss, Ginnungagap.
Q: Where did the great abyss, Ginnungagap, come from?
A: Never ask that question.
Consider the seeming paradox of the First Cause. Science has traced events back to the Big Bang, but why did the Big Bang happen? It's all well and good to say that the zero of time begins at the Big Bang—that there is nothing before the Big Bang in the ordinary flow of minutes and hours. But saying this presumes our physical law, which itself appears highly structured; it calls out for explanation. Where did the physical laws come from? You could say that we're all a computer simulation, but then the computer simulation is running on some other world's laws of physics—where did those laws of physics come from?
At this point, some people say, "God!"
Guessing the Teacher's Password
Followup to: Fake Explanations
When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves. I took pride in my scientific literacy, when I was nine years old.
When I was older, and I began to read the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I ran across a gem called "the wave equation". I could follow the equation's derivation, but, looking back, I couldn't see its truth at a glance. So I thought about the wave equation for three days, on and off, until I saw that it was embarrassingly obvious. And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves, I had not had the vaguest idea of what the word "wave" meant to a physicist.
There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says "light is made of waves", and the teacher says "What is light made of?", and the student says "Waves!", the student has made a true statement. That's only fair, right? We accept "waves" as a correct answer from the physicist; wouldn't it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer "Waves!" is either true or false, right?
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