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Fundamentals III - The Unseen Universe (some philosophical considerations)

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"The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer, as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it. " David Hume ( An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , 1772) Even though the scope of this page is not philosophical, it is interesting to realize that deep philosophical questions are behind the fact that most of our universe is invisible and that we are confined to a very limited sensorial realm. Such questions arise when one considers the existence of objects external to us, the objects of 'human enquiry' and how one can be certain about their existence. We know that science has developed its own procedures in order to explain natural phenomena. Today we known that there are many in...

Fundamentals II - The Unseen Universe (Examples)

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Some examples of the 'empirical' classification presented in our past post are given below. Not all phenomena are observable as we see. Many of them are non-observable and cannot be sensed in any way. Observable and cyclic:  Conspicuous astronomical events: apparent movement of celestial bodies, eclipses of the sun, moon, tides - rise and fall of sea level;  Seasonal ocurrrences: change of color of leaves in the beginning of autumn, the menstrual cycle; Observable and noncyclic: A large category of natural ocurrences such as: Weather and climate: storms, lightning, hurricanes;  Life (biology): an interesting example are bat´s sounds at the threshold of what can be heard by humans (below 20KHz). Most of bat´s interaction with the environment is ultrasonic and, therefore (according to our nomenclature) 'invisible' (non-audible), almost all life occurrences are noncyclic and shows a strong cause and effect link;  Geology: vulcanic eruptions (...

Fundamentals I - The Unseen Universe

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For centuries, people were unaware of the invisible, that in Nature there are hidden things out of reach of our common senses. The progress of science has unveil a new Universe formed by phenomena that will never be disclosed by these senses alone.  However, they become tangible through a transducer or special media. The role of these media is to be   intermediaries  between the phenomena and our senses. Classification of natural phenomena The universe contains many strata of different phenomena. Some of them are cyclic occurrences while others are sporadic. Many phenomena were discovered with the progress of science, but quite a few of them are accessible to ordinary observation (the so called human senses).  Instead of categorizing natural occurences in broad areas (physics, biology etc), one can divide them  according to their accessibility to our senses. We suggest to classify nature´s event by the following definitions: Observable phenomena: oc...