Reply to comment

While I was researching for my web paper I had a tough time choosing a topic. I realized that many of the topics I was interested in were very abstract, philosophical, or foreign and as a result difficult to talk about in concrete terms. That is partially why I like this class/Professor Grobstein's approach to science. He presents us with concepts that are hard to grasp and make us feel uncomfortable. But the idea of organizing a paper on an abstract idea was unmanageable. For example last week we were talking about the size, rate of expansion, and limit of the universe. This greatly interested me and seemed like a good topic for my web paper. Yet, the more I tried to think and talk about it the messier it got in my head. Discussing outer space in a logical fashion is onerous because it's outside our realm of understanding. The idea that space is continuously expanding is intangible; what is outside of space? What is it expanding into? Nothing? It seems to me that it is difficult for us to grasp not only because the universe functions on different spacial and temporal scales than we are used to thinking about, but also because the language we have is inadequate. We normally use the word "space" to talk about an area that is habitable, a particular place, of definable size. Even when we say that there is an empty space, it is not actually empty, there are trees, grass, a room, concrete...something. But "space," outerspace, is also the word that we use to describe the "space" outside the earth's atmosphere. And since the universe is expanding, what space is it expanding into? How can we even begin to talk about something that is so hard to grasp? If the answer, or one of the possible answers, is nothing how can we even begin to fathom that? How can there possibly be nothing if space, outerspace, is expanding into it? Perhaps the word "space" isn't even the right kind of word to apply to what is at the edge, if it has one, of the universe.