ASTRONOMY and knowledge

Head 2.

The context of human relations. Since the veneration of astrologers and astronomers a few thousand years ago, we have gone through the burning of some on the fire, then we appreciated them again when they put us back inside the solar system and revealed to us laws that we believed for many years. eternal. Now we simply look at them as dreamers and we barely understand them. Their ideas delighted us, sometimes amused us, but most of the time they made us think. This is how we went through time and today we come to try to understand what gravity means, or to want to perceive black matter in a way and if possible to travel through black holes. No matter how we look at the development of astronomy, we cannot detach it from the evolution of human society. We thus come to the idea that a feature of our species is the interest in the science of the universe. In this communion of interest and ideas we are linked by a specific language that thus becomes relational for those interested. Here we must note that less than ten percent of people can understand and assimilate it. Those with a poor education or even those who did not have the chance to go through any school, do not understand anything, but their humanity pushes them to show respect and desire to penetrate the meaning, if anyone has the ability to explain them in their limited language . We can only advance in knowledge by relating people to each other. No one can start like Sisyphus always from the beginning, he has to climb higher and higher on the shoulders of his parents, peers and acquire new horizons. The work-money cycle to survive and satisfy your desires is present in all eras and in all cultures. If the result allows to increase the intellectual baggage, then that desire is beneficial. When money serves to satisfy low desires such as greed, robbery or revenge, it becomes an evil intermediary, which is good to avoid. Humanity has long overcome the simple and ancestral desire to deprive him of food on his fellow man. Theft, a barbaric and primitive act, is justified in inferior animals, not in those endowed with reason who can obtain what they need with the power of the mind or arms. Modern means of dispossession of peers are of many kinds, often particularly ingenious, involving a complex elaboration and concealment of intent. We first acquired knowledge with the help of forms of communication such as writing or drawing, then photography, in order to reach in our time the almost endless strings of 0 and 1 which, as if by a miracle we make ourselves understood everywhere on the geoid on which we live our ephemeral existence. Knowledge can only be achieved through communication, viz.tehnologizare the dissemination of theories, hypotheses and observations to others for both recognition and validation. We can see that over time, some theories and hypotheses have either been validated by observations or rejected; some have even been brought back to life, such as the ether theory that replaces the vacuum in outer space. Now we know that between astral bodies of any kind, there is no space in which there is nothing and we have already moved on to a broad understanding of cosmic energy. We no longer make such a clear distinction between mass and energy and even admit the existence of exotic particles. We still don't know what dark matter is, but we tend to worry more and more about it, being almost certain that there is more in the universe than previously assumed. Accelerating internet communication permanently expands our area of knowledge through the contribution of peers on a global scale. Communicating a photo of sunspots or the position of Jupiter's satellites to a friendly astronomer you've never met in Australia or Argentina is now almost commonplace. The images that until yesterday we printed through a complicated and expensive process, have become digital and can be modified or transmitted with great ease. We are no longer interested in how these operations are performed, but we perform them so quickly, almost as we think. The interest in the cosmos and the exchange of opinions in the field of astronomy are rapidly spreading on a terrestrial scale. I even tried in the book "SOCIALIZING ASTRONOMY with examples" [1] to show that astronomy has acquired, among other attributes, that of closeness between peers, so a social function. As we showed in the mentioned book, the categories of individuals interested in astronomy can be differentiated according to education, sex, occupations, hobbies or geographical distribution. The last element, the geographical one, seems to me the strongest regarding the integration of the field of interest, in globalization. It is not even necessary to use a certain national language for this, as we already have the possibility to use the same bit strings that mediate the communication, translating in our place. Knowledge thus becomes an accessible good on the scale of all mankind.

Head. 3

From perception to tech. The human senses allow us to live in the environment, but it does not give us complete information about it. It is enough to notice that the view covers only a narrow band of the spectrum of electromagnetic waves discovered and theorized to make a systematization. In the system of the spectrum where the sound waves are located and it shows us that they are just a window in the much wider radio wave band, in which radio astronomy research is currently being done. I'm not talking about the ultraviolet part of the spectrum or rays named after the Greek alphabet, for which artificial cosmos research satellites are already being designed and built. Human perception has both general limits and limiting features for each individual. And if it were only that, it would still be good, but what do we do with what are called illusions of different kinds. So we can no longer be confident and satisfied with our own perception. Going from glasses, continuing with hearing aids and reaching modern amplifiers of hearing and sight, humanity is trying to go beyond primary sensations, to investigate more and more deeply the environment. If the eye helped us to see the shores closer, Galileo directed him to the moon and planets, broadening our horizons and knowledge of the sky. It was the moment of certainty that most stars have a globular shape (and therefore the Earth) and as the Andromeda galaxy can be seen even with a good view, astronomers have entered the world of galaxies. The next steps took an ever-accelerating course, so that in a few hundred years we went from expectation to experiment and sent the first humans on a celestial body. The leap was indeed "a great step for humanity." Exhausted by this scientific and technological effort, mankind took a short break to perfect its investigative tools. Improving data processing has pushed the development of computers from electromechanical to smart, miniaturization reaching incredible heights 50 years ago. Everyone can carry in their pocket at the same time, viz. in a single box: phone, watch, computer, camera, library of books and favorite music or movies, not to mention the compass and almost instantly updated maps. And I haven't listed them all. That's how we got the first large, high-resolution Hubble telescope out of the Earth's atmosphere to see the beginnings of what we still call the universe. Aware that we still have a lot to research from the spectrum of electromagnetic waves, we continue to expand the range of instruments. And we are already becoming aware of the threats that may come from the overly welcoming universe. This means that already the old distances such as the AU (astronomical unit -the large half-axis of the Earth's orbit around the Sun) seem to have shrunk, because our horizons have widened. We already know that space and time are intrinsically dependent and we are already investigating cosmic phenomena that happened billions of light years ago. Here we must remember that the lightyears (1 al is according to the formula S = T*v the product between the duration of an average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days or a tropical year J1900.0 and the speed of light of 299,792,458 m / s) have a popular use to express the extent of interstellar and galactic spaces. Professional astronomers use parsec (= 206264.8 AU or 3.2615 al). Now, right at the moment of observation, the participants in a galactic phenomenon may have disappeared, or turned into something completely different. The phenomenon that happened now may have taken place a long time ago, at a time when humanity did not even exist, corresponding to the great astronomical distance that separates us. Observing phenomena towards the "edge" of the universe, we try to see if the Big Bang hypothesis is confirmed, or we have to conceive another hypothesis closer to the investigated phenomena. And as any deepening leads to new scientific horizons, we are now concerned with Black Hole, how many multiverses or parallel worlds there may be and the power of dark energy / matter frightens us. participants in a galactic phenomenon may have disappeared, or become something else entirely. Observing phenomena towards the "edge" of the universe, we try to see if the Big Bang hypothesis is confirmed, or we have to conceive another hypothesis closer to the investigated phenomena. And as any deepening leads to new scientific horizons, we are now concerned with Black Hole, how many multiverses or parallel worlds there may be and the power of dark energy / matter frightens us.

participants in a galactic phenomenon may have disappeared, or become something else entirely. The phenomenon that happened now may have taken place a long time ago, at a time when humanity did not even exist, corresponding to the great astronomical distance that separates us. Already talking about the multiverse no longer seems like a scientific aberration. The proposals for a parallel universe are numerous, viz. 9, and it has been about thirty years since they worked on their theoretical research. I don't have to quote anyone to list the different types of parallel universes: quilted, inflationary, membrane, cyclic, landscape, quantum, holographic, simulated and last, perfect. The latter even gives substance to all possible mathematical equations, stating that every possible universe is a real one, thus removing the question of why one of the possibilities -ours -is special.

Recently, experiments in terrestrial laboratories on elementary particles have frightened the less knowledgeable that the Earth can be swallowed by a mythical black hole. The "particle of God" is only a vulgarization of the level at which man experiences in the laboratory on a small scale, possible phonemes that can occur in the cosmos. Among the modern concerns in the field of astronomy are now the research and specification of NEA orbits (Near Earth Asteroid). Such research is a concern even for some amateur astronomers in Romania. I discovered earlier that the universe is quite hostile to the human species. Astral bodies, as well as the phenomena or collisions they can produce, can even annihilate human civilization. They are not the nonsense imagined by the human mind, but facts resulting from thorough research.

Not only astronomy provides results, but also other sciences such as geology, history, geography, biology, which shows us how the harshness of the Earth has brought down various cataclysms. Interdisciplinary research, a prerogative of modern times, widens our area of knowledge and even begins to provide us with tools to try to perpetuate the human species regardless of hostile forces. Even a team of young people from Romania managed to make known internationally plans for the survival of a human colony in the cosmos. It has already been calculated, when and how the Sun can reach the Earth in its evolution, in a cosmic scale. All this amazing evolution of knowledge would not have been possible without the sustained and ever faster development of informatics and computers, which from the level of industrial halls have come to fit in their pockets. I wonder what else we'll find out, when a quantum computer will become like a smartphone, accessible to ordinary people.

Head. 4

The language problem. Starting from the explanation of the word "universe" from DEX -The Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian Language (2nd edition) [2]: "UNIVÉRS, universuri, sn 1. The world in its entirety, the whole of everything that exists, except for those believers, God the creator. 2. Space, with four dimensions (the three spatial coordinates and time), whose elements are events. 3. The globe; the populated part of the globe (along with everything on it); the inhabitants of the globe. ♦ The environment, the circle, the immediate world in which someone or something lives; material, intellectual or moral field. -From fr. universe, lat. universe. "We can realize without much intellectual effort that, already this concept or notion no longer corresponds to the times in which we live. If in the first explanation we find "the world, the whole of everything that exists", in the second explanation "the four-dimensional space, whose elements are the events" we enter an explanatory nebula, with references to other and other words, so that a severe pain it will make us give up the desire to understand more and we give up, saying that either our intellect does not help us, or that those who want to explain to us, maybe they do not understand very well what they say. I'm not talking about the third explanation, instead the last explanation is much more understandable, but it does not refer to what is the subject of astronomy. Many people, even if they are not scientists, have already learned about "multiverses" or "ndimensions". Also in DEX [2] if we come up with the crazy idea to search for the word "multiverse" we will not find any answer. We are not all experts in logic, but understanding the existence of something other than "everything that exists" (viz. other universes) gives us great headaches. Then everyone rightly asks, what is the UNIVERSE? If this is the explanation that addresses the general public, then let's try a specialized definition from the Dictionary of Astronomy and Astronautics [3] coordinated by acad. Călin Popovici. In this dictionary, the 1977 edition of the universe is defined as: "the whole world boundless in time and space, infinitely diversified, characterized by a multitude of forms of matter (weight or radiant), in different stages of development; includes all objects, events, We notice that the definition is less vague than in DEX [2], it no longer mentions God, it specifies diversification and extent, as well as independence from human creation. It is more scientific, closer to our times, but it also appeals to the notion of world that this specialized dictionary does not define. However, we find in DEX [2] this definition: "LÚME, lumi, sf I. 1. Totality of those existing in reality; universe, cosmos. 2. An ensemble of celestial bodies made up of the Earth and visible stars, constituting an organized system; solar system, planetary system. 3. The globe (with its entire animal and plant life), the earth inhabited by man. "It is good that we have also explained this notion, which appeals to key words such as totality and reality. It also gives the equivalence world = universe = cosmos. About reality we have in DEX [2] (4) facts, sn 1. Real event or circumstance, thing that happened in reality." Your head is already starting to ache when you try to figure out what is meant by words so commonly used by more or less trained people. The ordinary man who struggles daily to live and if possible as comfortable as possible, these questions concern him little or not at all. However, he must understand why with a part of the money of his work, the society in which he lives, he also pays those who, for the good of him now and in the future, are concerned with these true intellectual problems. That it is difficult to give simple but comprehensive and correct definitions in terms of the stage of evolution of science, no one doubts. Academician Solomon Marcus (the father of mathematical linguistics) drew attention to the end of his life that the age of "interdisciplinarity" had come, so linguists must make a common front with scientists in other fields and give us clear, unencrypted explanations. without references to other notions and accessible to all peers. Different branches of science are looking for answers to the new manifestations observed in the universe. The language problem must be solved not only in the field of astronomy, but also in other fields where neologisms transform our language. Now that bit strings are at hand in almost any field and we no longer have to flip through pages of books or travel miles looking for documentation, we need to move on to clearly and unequivocally establishing "where is the zero meridian" in the notions on which we use. Just as, in addition to the established meridian, we have established that PLUTON is no longer a planet, the time has come to say clearly what we need to understand by "UNIVERSE". And it's not the only one of the few notions of general culture that needs to be explained, which must be updated, we must also assimilate in our dictionaries the neologisms that have great circulation in the language of the whole society. We need to explain what the bit is, the black hole, what the multiverse is, and even the string and string. These are words that have already entered the language of amateurs, not only of specialized professionals. We will thus be able to combat functional illiteracy as well as language and comprehension errors.

Head. 5

The paradox of knowledge The scientific language in which we express our knowledge has many other problems and especially in terms of the definitions of the fundamental constituent elements. Let's start with the title of the chapter.

Paradox has the following definitions: (LAROUSSE elementaire) [4] is an opinion contrary to the common one, (OXFORD Advanced Dictionary of Current English) [5] a statement which seems to say something contrary to common sense or truth but which may contain a truth, (DEX dictionary explanatory of the Romanian language) [2] contradictory and, at the same time, demonstrable statement, Paradox comes from the ancient Greek paradox formed by para -contra and doxa -opinion.

Knowledge is defined as: (OXFORD) [5] as familiarity obtained through experience or string of information, (LAROUSSE) [4] idea, notion of something, information, the ability to feel, to receive impressions, (DEX) [2] perception of the surrounding phenomena and objects, to establish objectively the nature, the properties of a thing, the relations between the phenomena, to give them an interpretation in accordance with the truth, I know, I practice, I tried, I had the opportunity to see. Knowledge comes from the second ancient Latin source of cognition -to realize something, to understand, to know. Returning to the title of the chapter, anyone without being an erudite can notice that, as you try to know more about something, you gain new horizons of understanding and find that the previous bubble of perception widens with new aspects to be researched. You are amazed to find that instead of clarifying in the end, you notice that many other new aspects have emerged that require your interest.

Perhaps the best example of the emergence of new aspects to research, once you think you have clarified the explanation of a phenomenon is astronomy. When we thought we were approaching the moments near the BIG BANG and found out if the theory was correct, an aspect of the universe arose that posed even greater problems, namely the predominant dark matter and energy. It wasn't enough for us to still know too little about black holes and gravity. So when I thought we understood a phenomenon like BIG BANG, I found, on the contrary, that our understanding is overwhelmed by the misunderstanding of new phenomena. So the more we know, the less we know. And it's not the only thing that bothers me in explaining nature or the universe. Even these notions have trouble being explained. We find another philosophical aspect. Time is just a theoretical working hypothesis. There are two forms of time: the physical time perceived by the human being and time as a theoretical quantity used in physical calculations, as a working hypothesis. We can perceive and physically know only two aspects of it, namely the PRESENT and the PAST. The present is the one we live in moment by moment and which includes in it the past (the moment left behind) about which we can say something. We can only say about the FUTURE whether it follows or not, in the next moment. So time can only be imagined theoretically as an endless line in both directions. We can imagine TIME perceived as a right segment, with one end in the past of the existence of our being or at most of humanity about which we have descriptions (they can also be icons) and with the other end in the present that is built permanently, after the present moment becomes last. You can only perceive physical time and you cannot assimilate it even with a half-straight line (the origin of a point, the mobile PRESENT and a past that lags behind). To judge thus is a mathematical nonsense, because the segment or half-right cannot exist logically independent of a line. The human being has many perceptions due to the senses such as sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, but he also has the sense of time, viz. the moment in which he exists as a being. We are aware of these moments of existence just as we are aware of the fact that we think, that is, we mentally construct the world that we observe with the other senses related to our physical detectors. I say that we mentally build the environment we are in, because our senses transmit chemically and energetically the sensations that through chemical processes carried out at the level of neurons make us aware of the signal given by perceptions. We mentally build an image of the environment, we say close to reality. It is no secret that our perceptions can be misleading and confusing, but they are the weapons we fight with the environment to survive. Physically perceived TIME cannot be any dimension, as it should have a measure, size, extent (erroneous term, that it implies extension, viz. something variable). Until now, the units of time have been something arbitrary, established depending on the will of those who try to measure it. Each thinking being has its own perception of time, which can coincide with the time of other fellows only in the moment of the ephemeral present. There is also a problem of the perception of time as a physical entity, which can be felt more or less extended, depending on the moments of observation and perceptions of each individual. In "ELEGANT UNIVERSE" [6] page 41, physicist Brian Greene, a string theorist, says:

"There are differences in the perception of space and time between people resting on the ground and those traveling in cars or planes, but they always go unnoticed." We still have a problem with the notion of time. Drawing on the history of mankind, that is, relying on the past perceptions of the human community, we do research that seems to be in the future and discover dark matter and energy, proto-galaxies, but we forget that these discoveries tell us about times when not even the earth as a star may not exist. We thus arrive at the "PARADOX OF TIME", viz. we study in the future past times and maybe objects and phenomena that have already disappeared. As Brian Greene used to say, "Looking up, looking back." Researching the cosmos we learn about phenomena that happened at a time when our planet was perhaps smaller than a grain of sand. We thus logically come to the conclusion that the CONTINUOUS PRESENT intrinsically contains both the PAST and the FUTURE. So the only possible time to be perceived is the present, in continuous flow. The universe can be considered as an information processor, receives information about how things are now and produces information that outlines how things will be (planets, stones, atoms, particles, fields) in the next now and in the present after it. We thus come to a conclusion that TIME (and especially as the 4th dimension of space) is a viable working hypothesis, which corresponded only to a certain stage of human knowledge. Time as a theoretical working hypothesis is indisputably necessary, without it we cannot perceive the speed of changes in nature. The scientific world no longer even looks at time as something independent, it is intrinsically related to space and that is why we most often hear and read about space-time. As a physically measurable entity, time has big problems in terms of size, especially since the point of origin from which we measure can be anywhere (that's why we have more calendars). Ever since I gained enough knowledge of my mother tongue and other foreign languages, I have been concerned with the definitions of notions and the composition of words. As an example I understand that DIMENSION is a compound word consisting of two other simpler words DI which is an abbreviation of the notion DOI viz. expresses the existence of two parts that appear as identical and MENSION that comes from MEASUREMENT (lat. Mensura). So the dimension involves two parts, ie two directions (possibly negative and positive or forward and backward) separated by a point of origin of the meanings, as well as a unit with which we can try to see the size, viz. to measure the extent. As written before, even if I can accept the three dimensions of space (forward and backward, up and down, right and left) all originating in the observatory, it is difficult for me to accept time as a physical dimension, more first, because the origin, that is, the present that I perceive physically is mobile at every moment, the positive meaning to the future is a present that I construct in the moment to come, and the past as a negative meaning can always exist (often distorted) in the mind. and can be recorded in one form or another (icon, writing, memory card). We add here that the past, formed by accumulated physical presentations, has a history, but according to quantum physics, the universe itself does not have only one past, or a single history. In order not to be indebted to a possible explanation, I conceive of physical time as a trace left by the wheels of a vehicle traveling on a certain route. Traces may be altered as the vehicle progresses, or may persist for a longer time depending on the environment and social evolution. Traces can be insignificant and disappear with the disappearance of the vehicle, or persist and remain altered after, if the material in which they were impregnated was of a special quality (pictograms, writings, stored electronic memory). Physical time is the one that each individual perceives, and the objective time can be considered as theoretical, the one that we can imagine since the so-called appearance of the universe. As Brian Green writes in the ELEGANT UNIVERSE [6] p. 226:

"Time in our sense is a dimension that we can cross in only one direction, absolutely inevitably, not being able to return to a certain moment that has already passed. Of course, the coiled temporal dimensions may have properties different from the vast, familiar new temporal dimension that we imagine starting from the appearance of the universe and continuing until the present moment. " If I want to describe the time of my existence, I break it with a hammer, it scattering in shards, moments of existence bigger or smaller, more or less important, as I perceived them as a being with my own senses. That's how I think they sit in my memory and only my brain could order them for chaining. When you are towards the end of life, you find that memories, ie the past, can be much distorted in your own perception, compared to what your peers say, who may have perceived it differently, or maybe the notes in some form. According to special relativity founded by Einstein and quoted from the book "THE GREAT PLAN" [7] page 82 written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov:

"You can't give every event a time that all observers agree on. All observers have their own measure of time, and the times measured by two observers in relative motion to each other will not be the same. " With death, physical time disappears, but the time of the other observers remains. Returning to the "paradox of knowledge" we can say that we are looking for models to help us explain what is happening at our level, how far we have come with observation. We are now at the level described by Brian Greene in the ELEGANT UNIVERSE [6] pages 382 and 404:

"In the context of string theory / M theory, our level of understanding of cosmology is too rudimentary to determine whether what we believe to be "the theory of everything "justifies its name and determines its own initial cosmological conditions, thus raising them to the rank of physical laws. This is a key issue for future research. "

"The search is not over, but through string theory and its evolution to M theory, a compelling framework has finally emerged that combines quantum mechanics, the general theory of relativity, and strong, weak and electromagnetic forces." Knowledge goes hand in hand with technological development and the words of Stephen Hawking from "A SHORTER HISTORY OF TIME" [8] p. 74:

"With the rapid development of new technologies and new telescopes installed on satellites, we quickly find out new and surprising things about the universe. We can now get an idea of his behavior in the late age: the universe will continue to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Time will run out indefinitely, at least for those who are careful enough not to fall into a black hole. " Since already in the twentieth century science became too specialized and mathematical for philosophers, as for anyone, except a few specialists, philosophers have greatly reduced their field of research. It remained to them as Wittgenstein (the most famous philosopher of the century) put it:

"The only mission left for philosophy is the analysis of language " As we cannot summarize in an article the stage of the directions in which knowledge is now heading, we can only stumble upon notions and concepts that no longer have explanations corresponding to the current era, or try extravagant explanations, of which very few it could help us move forward.