> Well, this may seem a little odd, but why not. I tend to think of the apparent rift between our daily life (mortality) and Transcendance as being paralleled by the ongoing "Theory of Everything" debate in Physics. Here's the scenario: in Physics, we have two separate sets of frameworks to describe the Universe around us. There's classical Newtonian mechanics to explain the rules of the macroscopic world; and then there's quantum mechanics to explain the wonderful strangeness of the sub-atomic world. There is plenty of objective evidence to support both frameworks, and both work extremely well within their own individual demesnes.

Actually, there isn't really a conflict between classical and quantum mechanics, as long as you remember that quantum theory is the 'real' theory and classical mechanics is a good approximation when things are relatively big (larger than the atomic scale or so) Quantum theory can describe the motion of large celestial bodies just as well as classical mechanics, but to actually work out the incredibly messy equations for such large bodies is absurd when Newton's simpler mechanics gives almost exactly the same answer.

> On the other hand, there is also the language of mathematics and Quantum physics (again). Paradoxically, these fields allow us to describe things which we can't imagine. What is curious in this case is that often the math itself forces conclusions about the Universe that no one had an inkling of beforehand. That's where Supersymmetry Theory gets the idea about there being 11 space-time dimensions (7 spatial, 1 macro-temporal, 3 quantum-temporal?) because that's what the math suggests! Of course, whether this is correct or not depends on the validity of the logical premises behind pure math.
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> Wolfspirit
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> "Language puzzle: What if the entire concept of stuff existing 'Outside' the limits of the Universe is in itself a mathematical impossibility?"

Heh. Know how antimatter was first discovered? Dirac got it from looking at a square root.

Bal "I program in Java; God programs in Math" anthalus