Depends on the theoretical physicist. My brother was a theoretical physicist who held that it was all theory and could hit a wall at any moment. This would have delighted him.
Well yes. I was speaking hyperbolically. It's an interesting finding. It does draw somewhat settled science into question which is...uh...unsettling.
If it actually
is massive galaxies at the edge of space time it means something is not right, either with the Big Bang Theory, Gravity, or who knows what. That shouldn't be surprising I guess. I think everyone knows the problems with the theor
ies of gravity. Theories are just theories, and reality is
out there. Maybe our ape brains are ultimately incapable of truly understanding what we're looking at, and Einstein wasn't that smart after all, but at least here on earth, our cell phones work.
In the realm of theory, I don't think physicists can even agree on whether or not physics describes — or is capable of describing — reality, at all. That's one of the most interesting questions. Somewhere in a book by Erwin Schrödinger I read, he said something to the effect that if you think physics describes reality, then you don't understand physics. Maybe the universe is just a big house of mirrors, created by all that gravitational lensing, and there's no way to know what we're actually looking at. Or maybe it really is just the playground of space cats.
www.space.com
