Reminded me of this observation about Einstein.
(I cleaned up the typos.)

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/only-three-people-understand-general-relativity.935624/

From Verifying the Theory of Relativity by Chandrasekhar

Sir J.J. Thomson, as President of the Royal Society at that time, concluded the meeting with the statement, ‘I have to confess that no one has yet succeeded in stating in clear language what the theory of Einstein’s really is’.

And Eddington recalled that as the meeting was dispersing, Ludwig Silberstein (the author of one of the early books on relativity), came up to him and said,’ Professor Eddington, you must be one of three persons in the world who understands general relativity’.

On Eddington demurring to this statement, Silberstein responded, ‘Don’t be modest Eddington’. And Eddington’s reply was, ‘On the contrary, I am trying to think who the third person is!’

Further down in the discussion is this limerick, just for fun.
The opinions expressed are the sole responsibility of the anonymous author.

There’s a wonderful family called Stein.
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.
Gert’s poems are bunk,
Ep’s statues are junk,
and no one can understand Ein.

Let’s have the Enterprise check this out.
https://accordingtohoyt.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/gogh.png

The truth behind the moon landing.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2024/03/IMG_1027.jpg

The earliest known painting of Keith Richards is still a bit late, sorry Cappy.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2024/03/Screenshot-2024-03-12-at-7.02.52%E2%80%AFAM.png

Dark matter is the ‘answer’ to why everything out there acts as if it’s heavier than it looks. The second most popular answer is that gravity is weirder than we think and that at short distances (for cosmological distances, anyway) the extra terms don’t matter, like the relativistic additions to the kinetic energy equation, which are effectively zero at the human scale.

Dark energy is the ‘answer’ to why the universe is expanding.

Yeah, that was my first reaction when I heard this concept, quite popular these days, for the first time in reference to an extraterrestrial locale. After all, in space nobody can hear you scream, right?!

I think “density waves” would be a clearer term to use, since while “sound” is indeed a compression or density wave, the traditional context of “sound” is such a wave occurring within a planetary atmosphere, and perceptible by a biological organism.

There seems to be a lot of motivated back-reading going on, if you catch my drift.

The famous 10.129 hymn is just one place to start.

And given the political situation in India, and those sctapping to take ownership of the texts, and declare their “true” meaning to suit a social agenda, I doubt it will get much better, speaking in a general way. A mess I would not even wish to engage with.

Just to clean up some notions:

The Big Bang is not describing an infinite density of energy expanding out, it describes actual “reality” expanding… ie before the BB there was literally nothing. This is very hard to conceptualize, but it was literally spacetime itself coming into existence and expanding. That’s what the equations describe. Yes, and the parallel to Genesis and other such creation stories is obvious. Source of the BB?? no idea. Some try to invoke the Heisenberg UP in that given a delta T, there can be a large delta E, but this never made sense to me as there was no T at all.

Heat death: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics shows, and observations back up, that entropy is increasing always for any closed system…can’t get much more closed than the universe. The BB was a low entropy state, so the universe is evolving towards high entropy at which point it will be all at the same temperature and no net energy flow anywhere. The linkage of the movement to high entropy and the “flow” of time is still being debated.

Cyclic Universes: Take the current observed expansion of the universe by observed redshifts of galaxies and then combine that with gravity; you don’t even really need GR, Newton works just fine, it’s fairly easy to calculate a critical density of matter. If the density of the universe is greater than this number, the expansion will slow, stop, and then reverse..ie a cyclic universe. If less, then the universe expands without slowing. At the critical density the universe barely continues expanding. All measurements so far indicate we are right on the knife edge of the critical density. The existence of dark matter would obviously change the measured value.

And just to add to the spices: the constants, G, h, c, etc seem to be finely tuned such small deviations from their values lead to an uninhabitable universe…another possible expression of the strong Anthropic principle.

Isn’t this all a hoot? 🙂