What is reality?

I have just finished reading This Way to the Universe, by Michael Dine, a theoretical physicist. It ' s essentially an overview of what physicists think they do and do not understand about the universe, trying to convey it to lay readers. I won ' t try to quantify how much of it I think I understand, but hardly anybody really understands it, including at the deepest level the theoretical physicists themselves.But the details aren ' t really important to any but a few of us. The Big Picture is that scientific understanding has left all of our intuitions behind, along with all historical beliefs about the structure and meaning of reality. These old beliefs were mostly religious but also included metaphysical speculations that didn ' t need God, myth or scripture. But most people still depend on their intuitions about reality, and they needs metaphysical explanations that they can understand.I ' m willing to accept that 13.8 billion years ago the universe was compressed into a volume so small that spacetime as we know it could not exist. I ' m willing to accept that before 10^-43 seconds after it started expanding, the four forces of nature - electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity -- were unified as a single force, whatever that exactly means. I accept that at about 10^-37 seconds, the universe underwent an enormous expansion, increasing in volume by a factor of 10^78 before the inflation stopped at 10^-32 seconds, then continued to expand more gradually...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs