Tuesday 15 October 2013

Our Comprehensible World

"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility" said Einstein.  No, there is no mystery; it's not hard to understand at all.  If the world was not comprehensible we would not be able to live in it.  Life needs a stable environment to arise and evolve.  Life could not appear in a world of chaos, a world with arbitrary laws where information could not collect and meaning could appear - the digitally stored recipes for building organisms.  We live in a boring region of the universe that is close to being as cold as possible - just a few hundred degrees above absolute zero, and that is nearly empty - nothing like the nuclear densities of neutron stars.  Cold and nearly empty, our world is a place where regularity can exist, where conservation laws apply because one place is pretty much like another and today is pretty much like yesterday.  Our world is full of necessary symmetries, consistencies that make life possible.  Of course our world is comprehensible - worlds which aren't are dead.

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