Question: do you think are universe is real? if you can define real...or is it a hoax?

Paul Roche answered on 13 Jun 2010:

I hope it’s real, as I think I live in it…but this is a very interesting “philosophical” question, as theer are some religions etc. that they everything we think is real is actually a dream or something like that. I don’t think it is a “hoax”, as, as far as our science can tell, there is “real” stuff out there. We can see a lot of it, we can measure (weigh) all of it (we think), and we can produce rules that explain how it behaves. If it is a hoax, it’s an incredibly good one!

This is a very tricky question to answer, and I’m rubbish at the philosophy side of things, but I can tell you that, according to what we think we know about the Universe, we are only “seeing” about 4% of what the Universe contains (in terms of mass). In other words, if we “weigh” the Universe, it seems to weigh much more than we can actually see (using the electromagnetic spectrum) – it would be like seeing a mouse on a weighing scale but looking at the readout and seeing a number that suggested an elephant was actually on there!

We have invented the terms “dark matter” and “dark energy” to try and explain this problem – but basically, modern science has a big problem, as at the moment it seems that the “real” Universe contains a lot of mass which we simplky cannot see – it is effectively invisible to us. So you could argue that this shows that at least 96% of the Universe’s mass is not “real” in some way – at least, not real enough that we can say what it is (yet)!

I’m not sure that answers your question though? What do you think? Is everything just a part of some dream that some “supreme being/machine” is having, like in some religions and science fiction stories?!