Along with dark matter and dark energy, astronomers can now add dark flow to the lexicon of cosmic mysteries. Researchers have discovered that 700 distant clusters of galaxies, gas, and dust are all being pulled in the same direction, apparently toward something invisible and possibly very large, confounding current cosmological models. So far, what that “something” is remains speculative, but it could turn out to be a vestige of the universe’s earliest days. [Science, via 3qd]
Sounds pretty cool — though I think there’s a danger of making it more mysterious than it really needs to be… Why must they all be moving toward something at all?
Even the greatest minds in science seem to be subject to this bias: It isn’t enough for things to be moving simply because time exists, therefore action must occur. No, no. How much grant money would that bring in? Don’t be such a naive amateur, Brian. It’s so much more productive (even if it is less informative) to assume that everything is caused by some thing.
The assumption that somewhere under or beyond or above or inside everything is a thing that makes it go seems to result largely from the fact that the world at our level really does function like that. We live in a ’billiard ball’ world of objects set in motion by specific causes — namely, in many cases, objects set in motion by us.
This habitual way of conceiving action then gets applied where people and billiard balls don’t even exist, at the quantum, cosmological, and cognitive levels.
It’s a difficult habit to unlearn because the ‘object bias’ (I’m going to call it) is largely responsible for productivity and success in real, immediate, ordinary circumstances.
Imagine how different life would be for us if we didn’t learn, when young, that mommy is still behind the peak-a-boo blanket even though we can’t see her. Imagine how different life for us would be if one couldn’t assume oneself to be the same, identical person from each moment to the next. Imagine how different life would be if we recognized no laws of regularity — whether physical or social — and nothing constant could be carried over from moment to moment.
Our object bias is one of the things that makes us human — or rather, it’s one of our traits that helped us to evolve and survive. Even identifying this trait and giving it the name ‘object bias’ is conditioned by my object bias: There must be something…
Our ancenstors identified with objects and artifacts, which in turn were identified with eternal causes — gods — who acted on the world in much the same way that humans did (and still do). With this evolved other object-bias driven beliefs (about friends and enemies, for example), object bias-driven social norms, language, laws, commerce, philosophy, science, and math.
While ideas generated from our object bias may not correspond with the actual world, these ideas may be nonetheless beneficial. The great example is, of course, Newtonian physics — falsified by Einstein’s relativity but as important as ever in its use for designing and building structures and machines to help us work and live more effectively.
To be continued…
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