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| The Universe by Scientific Field |
 Title text: The math and philosophy people also claim everything, but the astronomers argue that the stuff they study really only comprises a small number of paper surfaces. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by A TINY PROPORTION OF THE UNIVERSE - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
Astronomy is the study of outer space and celestial phenomena. This comic makes a joke that most of the "universe" falls under the study of astronomy, which makes sense because it is so vast and large and is not studied directly by other fields of science.
The volume of the observable universe is 3.566×1080 cubic meters. The volume of Earth is 1.08321×1021 cubic meters.
1.08321×1021 m3 ÷ 3.566×1080 m3 × 100% ≈ 3×10-58%, which is scientific notation for the second of the two percentages, the first being its difference from 100%.
The title text says that mathematicians and philosophers claim that what they study also represents everything. But astronomers counter this by saying that they just study things that are written down, and this comprises just tiny amounts of "paper" on the Earth. This claim by mathematicians also appears in 435: Purity. A conceivable counterargument by philosophers could rely on the fact that all the knowledge gathered by astronomers is necessarily processed by human minds, a primary subject of philosophical study.
The information provided by astronomical observations of light, subatomic particles, and gravity's effects represents only a tiny fraction of the scientific properties of the extraterrestrial substances in the volume of space that astronomers study. Moreover, the adjacent fields of optics, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and geometry underpin almost all aspects of astronomy other than nomenclature, so proponents of those disciplines may see the comic as biased. Other objections could conceivably include the fact that most matter in the universe is described just as well by the laws of chemistry or physics as by astronomy. Or the fact that almost everyone's subjective life experiences are overwhelmingly more involved with events best described by fields other than astronomy, even in the case of professional astronomers (who often complain about how little time they can allocate to making actual astronomical observations) although this is to be expected as all but typically a handful of people are terrestrial. Finally, astronomy and astrophysics publications comprise only about 0.5% of academic science and engineering output worldwide, making them the smallest of fourteen such categories.[1]
However, astronomy and astrophysics are the only scientific disciplines that study the Big Bang and subsequent inflation from which all matter and energy arose. The ordinary laws of physics can describe neither of those events.
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
- The Universe by Scientific Field
- [A pie chart is shown.]
- Astronomy
- 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999997%
- Other
- 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003%
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