The Universe

We live in a fascinating Universe. There are things we can see with our naked eye. There are also things we can’t see with our naked eye. Scientific equipments, such as telescope, infrared detector, microscope and particle accelerator are employed as an effective means to assist us to probe the worlds lying beyond our naked eyes.

To appreciate the scale of the Universe we are living in, let’s take a look at some pictures that illustrate the sizes of things in the hierarchy of their associated scales.

Scale of things from human size ascending by a factor of 1000 times can be pictured as followed:

A human’s size -> A city’s size -> continent’s size -> Earth size -> Moon’s orbit around the Earth -> Earth-Sun orbit -> Solar system -> Milky way -> cluster of galaxy.

In the descending order, shrinking by a factor of 1000 times:
A human size -> hair -> cell -> cell organel -> DNA molecule -> atoms -> nucleus -> nucleon -> quarks -> ???.

It is amazing that human being could understand the principles and laws that govern the worlds with sizes spanning such a huge range, or order 10^(-19) m – 10^(36) m.

This is mainly due to the ability to probe these structures using equipped that goes beyond our naked eye. Due to the lack of such equipments the Greeks and olden day scientists are hampered in their endeavour to understand the nature of things larger or smaller accessible by their naked eyes are very much hindered.

Since we are talking about the Universe, then what is the definition of the Universe? One of the simplest definitions is: Everything is inside the Universe. Alternatively: nothing can exist outside the Universe.

Roughly, Universe has two aspects: The physical aspect, i.e. matter, energy and interactions, and the non physical aspect, e.g. consciousness and spirituality. Since science can only access things or phenomena that has physical attributes, it can only provide answer to questions pertaining to the physical aspect of the Universe, such as how stars evolve, what are matter made of and how things behave under certain interactions. On the other hand, science can’t answer questions to things or phenomena that can’t be physically accessible, such as the existence of ‘qi’, the existence of GOD or ‘biological field’ that do not manifest themselves physically. If heaven is not accessible to us by any physical means (such as it exist in another dimension that has not any physical interactions with us) then there is no way we can understand them with our scientific methodology. Another example: consciousness can’t be quantified or be measured with any empirical means, hence it doesn’t belong to the convention domain of science.

So, science’s is a rather restricted discipline that is omnipotent and is not suppose to be able to answer every single questions, particularly those that lies outside the domain of its scope.