The following is an answer and/or comment by inhahe aka ColorStorm (inhahe.com - myriachromat.wordpress.com).

Q: Why can science not explain what space, time, and mass are? S

Somebody else’s answer:

Explaining the universe is a bit like telling a child they have to go to bed right now.

You say “Time to go to bed now!” - and the kid says, “But why?” - so you say that they need to sleep and the kid says, “But why?” - so you explain that they’ll be cranky tomorrow if they don’t have enough sleep and the kid says, “But why?”.

No matter how much detail you go into with the child about the importance of replenishing their Adenosine Triphosphate levels and the absolute necessity of prolactin secretions to good health - they’ll answer, “But why?”.

Ultimately, you just have to yell, “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER WORD FROM YOU…GO TO BED RIGHT NOW!”…and mean it!

Well, it’s kinda the same deal with physics.

No matter how much we understand about the universe, there is always another “But why?” question underlying the answer we just gave.

We’ll doubtless come up with increasingly refined understandings about space, time and mass. We know that mass (for example) ties in with the Higgs Boson and the resulting Higgs field - but each time we unravel another level of explanation, there is a yet lower level thing that needs explaining.

Science: “The Higgs Boson causes the phenomenon of mass!”

People: “But why?”

Science: “GO TO BED RIGHT NOW!”

At some point, you just have to say, “This is where the nested levels of explanation bottom out right now - ask again after another decade of research.”…and that’s the answer to your question right now.

I don’t doubt for one moment that we’ll find a more refined explanation than we have today - but there will always be another “But Why?” question.

My comments:

The analogy with the child asking “why?” actually strikes me as more similar and revealing than it seems, as it’s a dialectical, creative process, as in the child is not actually discovering objectively deeper and deeper truths, the adult is just creating answers on the fly, which the child then assimilates and uses as the bases on which to ask her next “why.” Physicist finding more and more fundamental or further reductive truths may be similar.

For one thing, consider that under this paradigm, it would seem that there must be an infinite regress or infinitely layered onion of physical/metaphysical reasons for things being the way they are. But this doesn’t seem to make sense. That makes physics/the principles or processes of the universe ultimately even more complex than all the data/state of the universe! Or at least equally complex, if the universe is infinite. And furthermore, if there’s no bottom level, then what could possibly ultimately cause/determine that the world is one way as opposed to any other conceivable way?

The answer is, of course, not that there’s a bottom level—this would contradict the very nature of physics, as it dictates there’s no end to asking “why?”, and furthermore, that, too, would fail to explain why the universe is the way it is as opposed to any other way, since there’d be no explanation of why the bottom level is the way it is.

I strongly suspect that the universe is something we create with our collective consciousness, and the explanations or underlying patterns don’t all necessarily exist until we press the issue. In a quantum physics book I read, the author said in other words that it’s uncanny how many times physicists just guessed at some equation, pulled it out of a hat, and tested it and it successfully predicted observation. The observation may have been informed by expectation, which was then crystallized as a principle of the universe because seeing is believing, or because a physical result is metaphysical proof, or because some wavefunction of possible underlying physical principles was forced to collapse, or because of something like Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance being the basic principle behind all of physics.

Of course, it would be weird if one single physicist determined the physics of the entire universe with his observation, especially when you consider that other physicists on other planets must have already been there, but it’s possible that our physics is more limited to our particular world than we think. Perhaps this has something to do with light cones/the limitation of the speed of causality and observation separating worlds by eons. Someone I once talked to who seemed to have a model of the universe that seemed to have a smart answer for everything told me that the reason most of the universe is devoid of life is to give enough space between worlds for them to change their own timelines. Maybe this is related, too. But I’m just spit-balling at this point.

I’m not sure how this squares with the apparent level consistency/predictability/explainability we see in all of our astronomical/astrophysical observations, though. We could suppose that it all actually comes down to one’s own consciousness creating everything, or collapsing the universal wavefunction, including the astronomical findings, but then why would the physical principles be being created by other people, physicists I don’t necessarily even know about, while I’m not looking?

Or we could suppose the collective of Earth collectively creates what we observe in the entire rest of the universe, but that seems uncomfortably geocentric, or at least experientially isolating of us from whatever other worlds or collectives might exist independently of us.