Thinking of Questions

By Peter Limm

This is not a conventional book. It is designed to stimulate and challenge all people who are curious to find out about the world they inhabit and their place within it. It does this by suggesting questions and lines of questioning on a wide range of topics. The book does not provide answers or model arguments but prompts people to create their own questions and a reading log or journal. To this end, almost all questions have a list of books or articles to provide a starter for stimulating further reading. Once you start, you will be hooked! Never stop questioning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514463192

Peter Limm

Peter Limm has a degree in history from the University of Cambridge and a master’s degree from the University of London. He has worked in education for over forty years, teaching history, politics, and philosophy before becoming a head teacher. He set and marked secondary history examination papers for twenty years. He was a history inspector for a local education authority and one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (HMI). He inspected all types of school from primary to secondary level and also undertook inspection surveys to evaluate the quality of school provision for history and for gifted and talented pupils. He has had two books published: “The Thirty Years War” and “The Dutch Revolt,” both in the Longman Seminar Studies in History Series.

Book preview

1. THE COSMOS

In general try J. Brockman (ed.), The Universe: Leading Scientists Explore the Origin, Mysteries, and Future of the Cosmos, Harper Perennial, 2014*; S. Clark, The Big Questions: Universe, Quercus, 2010*; J. Webb (ed.), Nothing: From Absolute Zero to Cosmic Oblivion – Amazing Insights into Nothingness, Profile Books, articles from New Scientist, 2013*; C. Potter, You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, Hutchinson, 2009*; also his How to Make a Human Being: A Body of Evidence, Fourth Estate, 2014*; H. Kung, The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion, Eerdmans/Cambridge, 2007*; B. McGuire, A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted Know, Oxford, 2002*; G. Cox, The Existentialist’s Guide to Death, the Universe, and Nothingness, Continuum, 2012; B. Cox and A. Cohen, Human Universe, William Collins, 2014 and the accompanying BBC DVD series*; B. Cox and J. Forshaw, The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, Allen Lane, 2011; J. Brockman (ed.), What We Believe but Cannot Prove, The Free Press, 2005*; ‘The Universe’ in J. Polkinghorne and N. Beale, Questions of Truth, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009; Our Planet, New Scientist: The Collection, Volume Two, Issue Four, 2015; Earth Story, BBC DVD, 2006.

For young people try R. Trotta, Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is, Basic Books, 2014**; D. Walliman and B. Newman, Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, Flying Eye Books, 2013**; G. E. Harris, Big Questions from Little People Answered by Some Very Big People, Faber and Faber, 2012*; Ask the Experts: Astronomy, Scientific American eBook; B. Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Doubelday, 2003 (Black Swan, 2004)*; R. Anderson, ‘Some Questions Are Too Hard for Young Scientists to Tackle’, in J. Brockman (ed.), This Idea Must Die, Harper Perennial, 2015*.

How did the universe form and develop? Try S. Clark, The Big Questions: The Universe, Quercus, 2010*; Is ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ a good enough answer? B. Carr, Universe or Multiverse? Cambridge University Press, 2007; S. Lloyd, ‘The Universe’, A. Linde, ‘The Uniformity and Uniqueness of the Universe’, and A. Guth, ‘The Universe Began in a State of Extraordinary Low Entropy’, in J. Brockman (ed.), This Idea Must Die, Harper Perennial, 2015*; ‘The Universe’ in J. Polkinghorne and N. Beale, Questions of Truth, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009; H. Kung The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion, Eerdmans/Cambridge, 2007*.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Was the universe ‘caused’? To what extent could we say it emerged ‘out of nothing’? Try J. Webb (ed.), Nothing: From Absolute Zero to Cosmic Oblivion – Amazing Insights into Nothingness, Profile Books, articles from New Scientist, 2013*.

To what extent can something come from nothing? How did the big bang happen and was it caused? Is it a logically impossible supposition that something can explode out of nothing? To what extent is the phrase ‘before the big bang’ meaningless, since the big bang is the beginning of everything, including time? Try L. M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, Simon and Schuster, 2012; see Simon Singh’s answer in Big Questions from Little People, cited in the beginning of Section 1. The Universe; M. Gabriel, Why the World Does Not Exist? Polity, 2015.

How might the question ‘how did the universe begin?’ be the wrong question to ask? Does everything that exists (including the universe) have to have a cause, or can things (e.g. particles) emerge out of nothing? Could the universe have had no beginning? Try A. F. Ali and S. Das, ‘Cosmology from Quantum Potential’, Physical Letters B, Volume 741, 4 February 2015; H. Kung, The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion, Eerdmans/Cambridge, 2007*; E. Landau, ‘The Big Blip’, New Scientist, 23 May 2015; J. Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship, SPCK, 2007.

Was the ‘big bang’ the ‘moment’ at which space and time themselves began? To what extent was the big bang the beginning of something? What caused it? How far is it likely that there was ‘nothing’ before this? Did our big bang happen at a single point? Where in space did our big bang happen? How do we know we are not part of a ‘cyclic process’ whereby universes keep coming into existence? How far does the presence of antimatter in the universe explain its beginning ‘from nothing’? Was there a big bang/explosion? Where did the big bang come from? To what extent is it true to assert that although physicists can account for how there is something rather than nothing, they can’t explain why? What is wrong with traditional big bang explanations? Try L. Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; L. Smolin, ‘The Big Bang Was the First Moment of Time’, in J. Brockman (ed.), This Idea Must Die, Harper Perennial, 2015*.

How do we know what the first celestial objects were? Why do astronomers describe the period of the universe’s development between about 380,000 years until around 200 million years after its start point, the Dark Ages? How do we know what was going on in the Dark Ages? How was the night sky ‘lit up’?

How was Earth born? Why do the planets of the solar system all orbit in more or less the same plane? Why is there such an abrupt change in the composition of the planets from the inner to the outer solar system? If the Earth was formed during a maelstrom around 4.6 billion years ago and was barren, how did it eventually come to have oceans? (Try Our Planet, New Scientist: The Collection, Volume Two, Issue Four, 2015).

How far is everything random? Is it possible that a random subatomic world is what makes the universe possible? Try B. Cox and J. Forshaw, The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, Allen Lane, 2011; R. Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Coronet, 2012*; New Scientist, Chance: How Randomness Rules Our World, Special Issue, 14 March 2015*; N. Lane, ‘Inevitable, Fluke, or Both?’, in The Big Questions, New Scientist: The Collection, Issue One, 2014*; N. N. Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Penguin, 2013.

What caused the ‘microwave’ radiation static that can be heard through radio telescopes? How far do you agree that the universe, and all the energy it contains, seems to have arisen from little more than a gram of material which blew up like a balloon and inflated to being the size of the Milky Way in less time than it takes to blink an eye? Why is the temperature on one side of the universe the same as on the other when the opposite sides have not had time (during the universe’s 13.7 billion years and its rapid acceleration (or ‘inflation’)) to exchange energy and so equalise the temperature? If Einstein was right about matter curving the fabric of space, why, on the largest scales, do scientists say that it is ‘flat’? How will the work of scientists using powerful particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, deepen our knowledge of how the universe developed? Will there ever be a ‘picture’ of the big bang? Try G. Smoot and K. Davidson, Wrinkles in Time: The Imprint of Creation, Little, Brown, 1993.

To what extent is a unified ‘Theory of Everything’ possible? Or is it more the case that the truth can never be totally caught in any purely logical system? Try G. West, ‘The Theory of Everything’, in J. Brockman (ed.), This Idea Must Die, Harper Perennial, 2015*; A. Gefter, ‘Countdown to a Theory of Everything’, in The Big Questions, New Scientist: The Collection, Issue One, 2014; J. Brockman (ed.), This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works, Harper Perennial, 2013*; B. Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, Vintage, 2000; M. Midgley, The Myths We Live By, Routledge, 2003; also her Science and Poetry, Routledge, 2001; A. White, Towards a Philosophical Theory of Everything: Contributions to Structural-Systematic Philosophy, Bloomsbury, 2014.

How do we know how big the universe is? How would we know if it was infinite? If there is no single distance determination method that serves across all scales of the universe, how do we know how big the universe is? Is ‘billions of light years in all directions’ a good enough answer? If space is expanding all the time, how do we know by what rate? What does this mean for calculations about the size of the universe? Will we ever know and, for humans, does it matter? Try C. Potter, You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, Hutchinson, 2009; the comment of Alexander Vilekin in J. Brockman (ed.), What We Believe but Cannot Prove, The Free Press, 2005*.

How do we know how old the universe is? If the universe were infinitely old, would not the stars be static and equally spread uniformly through space, so brightening the night sky? If it is dark at night, does that show that the universe is not infinitely old and that light from distant stars has not had time to reach Earth? So, to repeat the question, how old is the universe? If we know, by radioactive dating of rocks on Earth, that Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, could that mean that the universe is also that old? If, as it turns out, Earth and its Sun are not at the centre of our galaxy and that stars, in clusters, can be identified orbiting the ‘centre’ of the Milky Way Galaxy (of which we are part), what do attempts to measure their age tell us? If astronomers have estimated that the average age of stars in the clusters is about 12 billion years, does that not show that the stars in our galaxy are much older than the Earth and imply that the entire universe is even older? Some cosmologists have pointed out that not only is the universe expanding, but that its expansion is accelerating. So if that is the case, should the age of the universe be estimated as being older than 12 billion years? Currently, the estimates suggest that the universe is around 13.8 billion years old. But can you make a better, scientifically compelling, case for a different estimate? Try J. Amos, ‘Planck Telescope Puts New Datestamp on First Stars’, BBC News, Science and Environment, 5 February 2015; also see papers on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) web site.

How far do we know what stars are? How do we know that stars are ‘made’ of debris from former stars (and other celestial debris)? How far can you tell the age of a star by how fast it spins? How do scientists know that across the entire universe hydrogen is the most abundant chemical (74 per cent) with helium second (24 per cent)? Why is the warm sunlight on our faces hundreds of thousands of years old? Try S. Clark, ‘What Are Stars Made From?’ in his The Big Questions: The Universe, Quercus, 2010*.

How far do you agree that the lights are going out all over the universe? If so, why is star formation slowing down? Try J Webb, ‘Fading Cosmos Quantified in 21 Colours’, BBC, Science News, 11 August, 2015; Peter Driver (et al,), Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) Panchromatic Data Release, July, 2015.

How far do we know why Life is the way it is? If all the elements we find on Earth, with the possible exception of hydrogen, were created by nucleosynthesis (nuclear fusion reactions) inside the cores of stars, does this not indicate strongly that these elements came to Earth during the asteroid and comet bombardment which took place around 4.6 billion years ago? How did life spontaneously form or emerge from the chemical mix of ‘star dust’? Some scientists have discovered that certain forms of life can exist (and only exist) in extreme conditions – such as near the vents of volcanoes on the surface of the sea floor (‘black smokers’). Is this how life emerged on Earth? Other scientists have found miniscule forms of life (nanobes) up to three miles below the seabed. Does this indicate that life was first formed in the depths of the Earth? Yet the crucial question remains: How did life make the jump from chemistry to biology? If science cannot yet answer this question, because it lacks an incontrovertible definition of life, are we left with mathematics and ‘information theory’ to provide us with the only credible way forward in defining life? Try D. Alexander, Creation and Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? Monarch Books, Revised Edition, 2013; H. Holmes, The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things, John Wiley & Sons, 2001; B. Cox and A. Cohen, Human Universe, William Collins, 2014 and the accompanying BBC DVD series*; New Scientist: The Human Universe, 2 May 2015; N. Lane, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is? Profile Books, 2015; F. Dyson, ‘Stardust’, New York Review of Books, 27 May 2015; A. E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011; M. A. Novak and S. Coakley (eds.), Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation, Harvard University Press, 2013; O. Edwards, Expanding Universe: Photographs from the Hubble Telescope, Taschen, 2015; see the answer by Laurence Krauss to ‘What Am I Made Of?’ in Big Questions from Little People, cited in the text at the beginning of this section*.

Why do planets stay in orbit? Is it all about gravity? How difficult is it to measure the strength of gravity? Does gravity behave the same through all the scales? What was relative about Einstein’s theory of relativity and was he right about gravity? Can energy and mass be interchanged even though mass cannot yet be measured accurately?

How do we know that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity is true? Einstein used the idea of space-time continuum to explain that gravity was not a force (like electromagnetism), but was created by the warping of space-time in the presence of matter. Why can’t scientists integrate this general relativity’s explanation of gravity into descriptions of the other forces of nature and so create a ‘theory of everything’? How successful is ‘string theory’ at attempting to do this? If general relativity holds up after so much testing, does that mean scientists will never understand the cosmos more deeply? Try A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, First published 1916 but Routledge Classics, 2001; R. Stannard, Relativity: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2008; P. G. Ferreira, The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity, Little, Brown, 2014; R. Mangabeira and L. Smolin, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy, Chicago University Press, 2014.

Will we ever know what a ‘black hole’ is? To what extent are they all-powerful destroyers that capture and crush everything around them? How will we know what is inside a black hole? Is it possible that the big bang was the result of a reversal of the process of a black hole singularity? Try N. D. Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, W. W. Norton & Co., 2014 (2007); S. Clark, ‘What is a Black Hole?’, in his The Big Questions: The Universe, Quercus, 2010*; the comment by Steven Giddings in J. Brockman (ed.), What We Believe but Cannot Prove, The Free Press, 2005*.

Why is ‘dark matter’ so mysterious? If no one has detailed a single particle of dark matter, why has it become a crucial component of modern astronomical theories? How do we know that without dark matter, much of cosmology simply falls apart? What is wrong with Newton’s theory of gravity as an explanation for what holds the universe together? Even if Newton’s theory was upgraded, would that still not be sufficient to explain how the celestial bodies remain ‘glued’ in place in galaxies at the outer most areas of the universe? It seems as if some particle physicists have theories without the ‘facts’ to support them and that they apparently ‘predict’ [invent?] particles to enable their theories to ‘work’ and then go in search of them – how far do you agree? Is dark matter a case in point? Is this the way scientists work generally? Try S. Fuller, Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science, Icon Books, 2003; B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton University Press, 1986 Edition.

How far is ‘dark energy’ even more mysterious? Calculations suggest that dark matter represents about 22 per cent of the universe and atoms about 4 per cent, so why do cosmologists think that the remaining 74 per cent is dark energy? (What about antimatter?)It seems that the expansion of the universe following its start point is not slowing down but accelerating, and cosmologists have postulated the existence of dark energy to explain this. How will we know if they are right? Is the speed of expansion of galaxies the same everywhere in the universe? If not, would this mean physicists have to abandon the mathematics of general relativity? Could there be any links between dark matter and dark energy? Are dark matter and dark energy working against each other? Would dark energy be a new, fifth, force of nature? (Some physicists have already named it ‘quintessence’.) Would it be simpler to try and modify gravity (and modify Einstein)? Is it all much more complex than any of these predictions, theories, and attempted modifications suggest? Is it that the more we find out, through surveys of galaxies for instance, the more we realise how little we actually do know and can account for? If so, is it time to ditch the ‘Standard Model’ in physics or can it be suitably refined? Try J. Webb, LHC: ‘We Want to Break Physics’, BBC News, Science and Environment, 6 March 2015.

Of what significance is the discovery of a giant ‘supervoid’ (1.8 billion light years wide) in the universe? How might it explain the ‘cold spot’ in the universe? How did it form? What implications does it have for scientists modelling the big bang?

Is anyone out there? If so, where are they? On current estimations there are 200 billion galaxies in the universe, so why would there not be life elsewhere? Although the current absence of evidence for intelligent life ‘out there’ is not evidence of absence, the ‘great silence’ remains. So should we just accept that we are actually alone in our galaxy (and perhaps the universe too)? If even silence has sound, what sound might we expect intelligent life forms to be transmitting? Might intelligent life forms on other planets have developed ways of communication so different from our telecommunication transmission methods that actual communication is always likely to be slim? In any case, if light travels at 0.7 billion miles in an hour, and 5.9 trillion miles in a year, and if the universe spreads out for billions of light years in all directions, isn’t it more likely that any ‘message’ arriving from intelligent life in far-off galaxies, will not reach Earth before it is destroyed by the expanding Sun? If we did receive a message, how far is it likely that, given the time it took to reach Earth, the intelligent life would itself be extinct? How would we assess how ‘intelligent’ the life form was? Would we understand the ‘message’? If aliens landed, and if they were not homo sapiens but a far superior species of life, what implication would this have for those who believe that God made human beings ‘in his image’? Try the answer given by S. Shostak to ‘Do Aliens Exist?’ in Big Questions from Little People,* cited at the beginning; V. Jamieson, ‘Are We Alone?’, in The Big Questions, New Scientist: The Collection, Issue One, 2014; try the brief comments by S. Petranek, C. Porco, P. C. Davies, K. W. Ford, K. Sabbagh, and J. Venter, all in John Brockman [ed], What We Believe But Cannot Prove, The Free Press, 2005.

How could we, if at all, travel through space and time? Given the distances identified in the questions above, if human beings do not construct a method of travelling faster than light, will it ever be possible to travel far through space? After all, if the universe is expanding at an increasing rate (space may expand faster than the speed of light), how likely is it that we could ‘catch up’ with the disappearing stars and their galaxies? If the universe was not expanding, and even if we could travel at the speed of light, it would take 4.3 years to reach the nearest star. So if we cannot travel at that speed, how likely is it that the rest of the galaxy (let alone other areas of the universe), will forever remain beyond our reach? If it were possible to stretch space like a piece of elastic so that a spaceship could travel along the stretched section, and also if it were possible for the space behind the ship to be expanded and space in front of it to be contracted (‘warping space’), then how far might it be possible to travel huge distances? But since nothing like this process exists, should the idea be abandoned? Another possibility might be to control gravity, but again, how? Could there be such things as short cuts through the universe – ‘wormholes’? Try the answer of John Gribbin to ‘Will We Ever Be Able to Go Back in Time?’ in Big Questions from Little People, cited at the beginning of this section; S. Clark, ‘Can We Travel Through Time and Space?’ in his The Big Questions: The Universe, Quercus, 2010*.

Is there space beyond the universe? If space has a ‘boundary’, what would it be like? Could you pass through it?

To what extent does human life have the potential to spread throughout the galaxy and beyond?Should it? Can we afford to explore the galaxy, let along the universe? On the other hand, can we afford not to explore the universe? Try J. Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books, 2002; K. Fong, Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body, Hodder, 2013; ‘The Human Universe’, New Scientist, 2 May 2015; Martin Rees in J. Brockman (ed.), What We Believe but Cannot Prove, The Free Press, 2005*; D. Shukman, ‘New Horizons: Why Bother Exploring the Solar System?’, BBC Science and Environment, 18 July 2015*.

Are there many universes? If so, how do we know? If so, how many? To what extent is it a realistic possibility that every time we make a decision, other universes are conjured up? If there are parallel universes, does that mean there is the possibility of life after death? How would we know if the universe has just split into two? Try M. Kaku, Parallel Worlds: The Science of Alternative Universes and Our Future in the Cosmos, Penguin, 2006. How many universes might there be? How do we know if Tegmark’s model of four different levels of parallel universes is right? (M. Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, Allen Lane, 2014; B. Carr, Universe or Multiverse? Cambridge University Press, 2007).

How far does measurement ‘create’ reality? To what extent is the most important lesson that physics has taught us about the nature of reality that it is very different from what it seems? How far do you agree that everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real (Niels Bohr)? Try R. Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, Vintage, 2012; M. Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, Allen Lane, 2014; G. Cochran, ‘Better Measurements’, in J. Brockman (ed.), This Will Change Everything, Harper Perennial, 2010*.

Does quantum theory describe reality, or is it just a mathematical ‘trick’ designed to ‘provide’ the right answer? How would we know if it was right? Try A. Zeilinger, ‘There Is No Reality in the Quantum World’ and D. Deutsch, ‘Quantum Jumps’ in J. Brockman (ed.), This Idea Must Die, Harper Perennial, 2015*; M. Brooks, ‘What Is the True Nature of Reality?’ in his The Big Questions: Physics, Quercus, 2012*; B. Cox and J. Forshaw, The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, Allen Lane, 2011.

How far would demonstrating that ‘inflation of the universe’ was true, mean that physicists will have to accept the fact that parallel universes exist? Would that mean there is more than one version of each of us out there somewhere?

To what extent are Cox and Forshaw right to claim that ‘everything that can happen does happen’? (The Quantum Universe, Allen Lane, 2011). If so, how far would/might this mean that the laws of physics are predetermined in some way? Try L. M. Krauss, ‘The Laws of Physics Are Predetermined’, in J. Brockman (ed.), This Idea Must Die, Harper Perennial, 2015; S. Clark, ‘Can the Laws of Physics Change?’ in his The Big Questions: The Universe, Quercus, 2010.

To what extent is physical reality ultimately a purely mathematical structure with its only intrinsic properties being mathematical properties – numbers such as dimensionality, curvature, and topology? How far is