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For thousands of years, humans have pondered the meaning of our existence. From philosophers who debated whether their minds could be trusted to provide accurate interpretations of our reality to physicists who’ve attempted to interpret the weirder aspects of quantum physics and relativity, we’ve learned that some aspects of our Universe appear to be objectively true for everyone, while others are dependent on the actions and properties of the observer.

Although the scientific process, combined with our experiments and observations, have uncovered many of the fundamental physical laws and entities that govern our Universe, there’s still much that remains unknown. However, just as Descartes was able to reason, “I think, therefore I am,” the fact of our existence — the fact that “we are” — has inevitable physical consequences for the Universe as well. Here’s what the simple fact that we exist can teach us about the nature of our reality.

To start with, the Universe has a set of governing rules, and we’ve been able to make some sense of at least some of them. We understand how gravity works at a continuous, non-quantum level: by matter and energy curving spacetime and by that curved spacetime dictating how matter and energy move through it. We know a large portion of the particles that exist (from the Standard Model) and how they interact through the three other fundamental forces, including at the quantum level. And we know that we exist, composed of those very same particles and obeying those same laws of nature.

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That the Universe exists and that we are here to observe it tells us a lot. It enables us to place constraints on various parameters, and to the infer the existence of states and reactions that present themselves as gaps in our present-day knowledge. But there are severe limits to what we can learn from this type of reasoning as well  (Credit: NASA/NEXSS collaboration)

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