“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
This is an anti-rationality quote from Lovecraft, and has little to do with anything under discussion. What makes you think that trying to understand the early universe is likely to cause insanity or anything similar?
I just wonder why the prevailing cosmological model in my lifetime has mysteriously come into question. Does the act of observing the universe somehow change its inferable past?
That model isn’t that old. So if you were living say ~50 years ago the prevaling model of the time would also have come into question (and been overturned).
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
This is an anti-rationality quote from Lovecraft, and has little to do with anything under discussion. What makes you think that trying to understand the early universe is likely to cause insanity or anything similar?
I just wonder why the prevailing cosmological model in my lifetime has mysteriously come into question. Does the act of observing the universe somehow change its inferable past?
What does that wondering that have to do with the quote in question?
Almost certainly not, but what does this have to do with anything under discussion?
That model isn’t that old. So if you were living say ~50 years ago the prevaling model of the time would also have come into question (and been overturned).