• Question: All the different parts of science are they all down to 1 thing (one thing that started it off)?

    Asked by babystar to Louise, Michaela, Steve on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Louise Johnson

      Louise Johnson answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Good question!

      The barriers between different sciences are a human invention – we’re all just trying to answer questions using a set of tools like experiments and statistics and logic. There’s no sharp dividing line where physics turns into chemistry or biology turns into ecology. So in that sense science is all one thing.

      But it’s too big a thing to study all at once, which is why we specialise on the bits that interest us most.

    • Photo: Michaela Livingstone

      Michaela Livingstone answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Science can be simplified to make it easier to understand. But we can only simplify things down to a certain number of causes. So far we don’t know if there is one thing that started it all. The big bang started our universe, but then something must have caused the big bang. In other words, we need to do lots more experiments to find out; but we’ll get an answer eventually.

    • Photo: Steven Kiddle

      Steven Kiddle answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Einstein spent the last years of his life researching this. The idea that one thing could explain the universe is known as a TOE (Theory Of Everything) or a GUT (Grand Unified Theory). The closest people have got is the electroweak theory, but the best merger of quantum mechanics and general relativity may be found in superstring theory.

      Physicists believe that it may have the collapsing of extra dimensions that set everything in motion. Religious people would probably say god. No-one really knows!

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