An Ocean of Unknowledge
One-hundred-and-eighteen years ago, there was a man who declared: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Little did he know that some decades later general relativity and quantum mechanics would revolutionize the realm of physics, completely transforming the way we look at the world. Yet this was no mere misguided rookie; this was the great Lord Kelvin. As a scientist he was a force of nature, a man of such splendid scientific repute his name is eternalized in the annals of physical history as the measure of a force of nature.
But that was long ago. Now, more than a century later, surely our book of knowledge is complete, the blank spots on our maps inked? Alas, two categories of unknowledge remain. The first concerns known unknowns: things we know we don’t know. How do we unify the Standard Model of quantum mechanics and gravity of general relativity? How does the flame of consciousness ignite? Every discipline possesses matters that leave the greatest minds scratching their heads. If knowledge were 16th century Europe, those issues would be the New World; we are aware of its existence but its contents remain a mystery. While exploring these metaphorical unchartered territories may not be straightforward, at least we know where to send Conquistadors to conquer these lands in the name of Science. But once we have surveyed these exotic places and coloured the blanks on our cartographic map of knowledge, a final bastion of undiscovery remains.
The only problem is… We don’t know it exists.
This is the far more insidious category of ignorance, things we don’t know we don’t know: unknown unknowns.
Known unknowns are questions we don’t know the answer to. But in the case of unknown unknowns, we don’t even know the question. Why do some bacteria develop resistance to our antibacterial arsenal? This thought can occur to you only once you have discovered bacteria. Were you to pose this question to a miasmist who lived prior to the advent of germ theory, he would have looked at you strangely (or possibly this could have been a symptom of an untreated bacterial infection). If you have no idea what a bacterium is, how can you even conceive of something like its resistance? Like a toddler tasked with writing poetry; if you have not yet developed the vocabulary required, the concepts are simply inconceivable. Equivalent knowledge eludes us for similar reasons. We may feel we are close to answering everything, but a vast ocean of undiscovered conceptuality lies beyond our grasp, one whose existence we are unaware of. The answers to the questions of today are the foundations of the questions of tomorrow.
It is easy for us to condemn the Lord Kelvin for his statement knowing what we know now. But before we pass judgement we must needs realize that we are no less ignorant; had it been an Olympic discipline Homo Sapiens would collectively share the gold. Being cognizant of the limits of our knowledge is not just arduous, it goes against our very biology. In the archaic savannah it would have been a death sentence. The hunter-gatherer-philosopher who contemplated unknown unknowns while the steppe shrubbery rustled would be well and devoured by a sabre tooth tiger by the time her essay reached the peer-reviewed journal Prehistoric Nature. It was dash, or death. Dismissing what lies beyond our scope of perception made us survive.
But what served us well on the serengeti does not serve us in the realm of discovery. Declaring we have discovered everything there is to discover is therefore the very antithesis of science. When there is no room for doubt, science calcifies into dogma, leaving it an empty husk of itself. The archenemy of truth is not falsehood, but certainty.
Only when we can admit we are wrong, can we be right. Being humble and accepting we do not know everything is the first step in the journey of discovery called science. And slowly but surely, slice by slice, we can peel back the layers of the onion of Truth and see what treasures await us, making us tear up at the elegance of the wonders of the world.