You mean like this?
I wonder if bob++ was referring to pulsars, not variable stars. The plaque on the Pioneer probe contains a diagram that shows our location relative to prominent pulsars. And pulsar navigation for interplanetary navigation has been proposed.
Nothing like giving the Kzinti a gorram road map for their conquest / harvester fleet.
Except that pulsars also change with time, and are also directional.
To the OP: you use the words “atom” and “proton,” so you are comfortable enough with them–can fathom them–to a certain extent.
The actual, real dimensions of these things, how they exist and operate, is about as unfathomable as anything else in this whole damn Universe, including this whole damn Universe with us in it deciding what is “fathomable” and what isn’t, let alone if decision a or decision b bugs us.
In one of his movies Woody Allen is asked if he can fathom the Holocaust, and he says “I don’t even get how scissors work.” I find this a consoling joke.
Do Americans have a problem with using the word fathom as a verb?:rolleyes:
I find it hard to belive you can split everything in half until you get to planck length. Why can’t you have half planck length?
Just split it in half, lol.
My pet theory is that every particle in the universe reflexively contains the entire universe within it, and the passage of time is the flow of everything exchanging itself with each thing. Where ever the universe is emptiest, there is no real passage of time.
At the level of Planck length, measurement starts to become meaningless. What are you measuring with? What aspect of reality will matter at a smaller length?
You can think about smaller lengths, but anything physical at smaller lengths becomes, at best, a blur.
You realize that your theis, at its essence, is just an argument from incredulity? “I can’t understand it, therefore it’s impossible.”
I find it hard to fathom why you would pick that one and only thing out of everything that has been said to pettily respond to.
Perhaps we do not think it means what you think it means.
Fathom means six feet. Fathoming therefore means measuring things by six foot lengths.
See? We do understand.
I am genuinely confused. You’ve never used the word “fathom” as a verb at any time in this thread, but you seem to be concerned that nobody else has either.
I just can’t grok this.
I think “fathom” was not commonly used as a verb for measuring depth. Seems to me more common nautical term is “sounding”, which predates sonar (a rope with six-foot-interval knots in it is a soundline). And the Mississippi riverboat sounders called out a safe depth of two fathoms with the cry “mark twain”.
“Do Americans whitewash every thing pointed out to them, no matter how loathsome and vile, such as unfathoming words, by dragging in Mark Twain?”
[heh, “whitewash.” Plus I upped the verb count.]
What makes you think you can’t? There is nothing known to science that would prevent it. Now, granted, there’s a heck of a lot we don’t know about what goes on at that scale, so maybe you can’t have a half of a Planck length… but maybe you can.
That’s hard to fathom!
Who are you calling an American?
Anyway, you used the word “unfathomable” which is an adjective.
It isn’t clear what the initial question was if you raise this question. I think most people have taken the meaning of unfathomable to be that of not being capable of being understood. Are you using it in the sense of not capable of being explored? Given the initial question segued to a question on alternative theories of the universe, it seems rather reasonable to assume the question was directed at understandably, not exploration.