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@ Chris Liss
2025-06-04 08:32:29"Modern science is based on this principle: give us one free miracle and then we'll explain the rest."
— Terrence McKenna
I always wondered why a pot of water boils on the stove. I mean I know it boils because I turned on the electricity, but why does the electricity cause it to boil? I know the electricity produces heat, and the heat is conducted through the stainless steel pot and into the water, but why does the heat transfer from stovetop to the water?
I know the heat from the stove via the pot speeds up the molecules in the water touching it and that they in turn speed up the molecules touching them and so on throughout the pot, but why do speedy molecules cause adjacent molecules to speed up?
I mean I know they do this, but why do they do this? Why couldn’t it be that sped-up molecules only interact with sufficient speedy molecules and ignore slower ones? Why do they interact with all the molecules, causing all of them to speed up? Or why don’t the speedy ones, instead of sharing their excited state, hoard it and take more energy from adjacent slower molecules, thereby making them colder, i.e., why doesn’t half the water boil twice as fast (on the left side of the pot) while the other half (right side) turns to ice?
The molecules tend to bounce around randomly, interacting as equal opportunists on the surrounding ones rather than distinguishing only certain ones with which to interact. Why do the laws of thermodynamics behave as such rather than some other way?
There may be yet deeper layers to this, explanations going down to the atomic and even quantum levels, but no matter how far you take them, you are always, in the end, left with: “Because those are the laws of physics”, i.e., “because that’s just how it is.”
. . .
The Terrence McKenna quote, recently cited by Joe Rogan on his podcast, refers to the Big Bang, the current explanation adopted by the scientifically literate as to the origins of the universe. You see there was this insanely dense, infinitesimally small micro dot that one day (before the dawn of time) exploded outward with unimaginable power that over billions of years created what we perceive as the known universe.
What happened prior? Can’t really say because time didn’t yet exist, and “prior” doesn’t make sense in that context. Why did it do this? We don’t know. How did it get there? Maybe a supermassive black hole from another universe got too dense and exploded out the other side? Highly speculative.
So why do people believe in the Big Bang? Because it comports with and explains certain observable phenomena and predicted other phenomena which were subsequently confirmed. But scratch a little deeper for an explanation as to what caused it, for what purpose did it occur or what preceded it, and you hit the same wall.
. . .
Even if we were to understand at a quantum level how and why the Big Bang happened and what preceded it, let’s assume it’s due to Factor X, something we eventually replicated with mini big-bangs and universe creations in our labs, we would still be tasked with understanding why Factor X exists in the universe. And if Factor X were explained by Process Y, we’d still be stuck needing an explanation for Process Y — ad infinitum.
Science can thus only push the wall back farther, but can never scale it. We can never arrive at an ultimate explanation, only partial ones. Its limitations are the limitations of thought itself, the impossibility of ever creating a map at a scale of one mile per mile.