Big Bang Reality Check.

I was reflecting on some recent ideas about the "human centric" understanding of our universe. Our minds and bodies are naturally designed to work within a certain size of objects, quantities, spaces and within human perception. And for everything outside that space we scale things to fit our understanding.

For example we zoom in on and normalize small objects on computer screens until they fit inside our peripheral vision, just like we do with objects normally within our purview. And very large objects we zoom out. For very large counts we have developed methods to organize, quantize and analyze data. We often find ways to visualize or auralize data because we also remap all the things we can't develop (e.g. radio waves) into the visual or audible spectrum.

So I was thinking that if we fit our entire understanding of the universe into our human-centric perception then our understanding of the big bang must also fit into that perception. And an important thing to realize is that there are limitations to our understanding of the universe because there are very clear limits to the things that any human being will ever understand (btw studies on whether or not aliens are also bound by these rules are tbd). So if all these things are true then what we know about the big bang, the end of things and the end of the universe are actually imposed by us human beings on the universe.

And further more if everything is just a concept, contrived by people to help us understand the universe, and that concepts are not real, and that we will never really know the true nature of the universe, then things like the age of the universe, the accelerating universe and all the other unpleasant conclusions may not matter and may not even be true.

But hold on, I'm far from a science denier. I do think that the scientific conclusions about the universe are, at the very least, the best understanding we've come to as of yet and of course that science itself will only be able change these conclusions. But it does make me question the nature of reality and to what extent do we really know the universe and can it be proven that we know something about the universe?