So scientists really know close to nothing

Fear not, safe space lovers, this is not an anti science rant. Was listening to NPR show the other day, and one of their guests was a astrophysicist. He was talking about the scientific method and discoveries. Made some interesting points but 2 really struck me.

He said we're actually pretty arrogant when it comes to science. We think we know so much, but in reality we know almost nothing. He then pointed to the fact that we don't know the composition of 95% of the universe - dark energy and dark matter.

He also made the point that much of the knowledge of the universe is likely above our understanding. Referenced an analogy to him having a smart cat. Said it's the smartest cat he's ever had, but he still will never be able to teach it french - much like their are some concepts that we just lack the capacity to understand.

Thoughts or is your mine already imploding?

"much like there are some concepts that we just lack the capacity to understand"

I really want to know what it is we don't have the capacity to understand, but I understand the futility in that.

The crux is really that we don't know what we don't know. This is almost as much speculation as the multiverse theory or idea that we're all in a simulation or the idea that we're all cells in a larger organisms body.

There are some very alien things out there that humans will never get, because it's on a completely different wave length, like black holes. But what separates humans from other animals is the ability to self reflect and understand the universe with mathematics, sacred geometry, physics, etc. Even if an alien race visited us and started speaking to us in some foreign language, we could still decipher it eventually, like in the movie Arrival. In terms of understanding our universe, our vision keeps growing every day, and I don't think humans have a "cap" to learn new things. We may not be able to understand even the most basic things, like how our brain even functions or where we as a species came from, but we can definitely learn what it all is eventually over a period of time.

People as a whole know close to nothing but the scientists are the ones willing to admit they're wrong and invite correction instead of saying "**** it, must HAVE (not must of for all you know-nothing twits (my apologies if English is not your first language)) been God."

I'm optimistic about humanity's ability to know.

Right, but we learn new things as specie every single day. For you, today it might be the realization that we "know close to nothing", yesterday it might be possible habitable planets, tomorrow, who knows, maybe we crack those pesky black holes.

We chug along, one day at a time.

Knowing everything is boring. It's like reaching max level in an RPG, what is left afterwards? I doubt the universe has a good PVP arena once we reach max level.

Yeah, when it comes to space/universe all of them admit that they dont really know much. Its not that they dont know what they are doing, its that every time the figure something out, it opens 20 other doors. so you solve only mystery, but now it brings up 20 other mysteries now that we didnt know before.

Its your typical case of "the more you know, the more you realize you dont know much"

But thats what they like, they love to know that there is so much more to figure out.

I dont see how the opinions of a single physicist represent the whole of science. Science is the act of knowing less and less about more and more. These people are educated, and hopefully they follow Socrates on what an educated person is, someone who knows their own ignorance. It's a way more honest and enlightening pursuit than truth by revelation, for example.

I give em the benefit of the doubt (along with dose of caution). They predicted black holes when the tech to detect them wasn't around.

Our understanding of the universe is limited to the tools we use to observe it. That's why we have CERN, to make observations here at home and to sort of simulate what happens in outer space. Another limitation is our imagination.

Speak for yourself.

Star Wars and the myriad of other sci-fi titles with epic battles disagree with you.

Progressive thing...new discoveries will continue to make ..even at the end of your lifetime. :P

I think any half-smart person knows this...

not so much you know the composition of the universe and such, but more the general idea that we don't know anything.

I think ego gets in the way, unfortunately. And insecurity.

The potential nature of the universe beyond 3 dimensions.

An example would be.... hummm..... like the movie Arrival with time. Many view time as the 4th dimension anyway, and if we consider it in this manner there will be aspects our brains simply cant comprehend and cant see or even understand is there. If you think string theory has some merit then this says we have 11 dimensions with only 4 we are capable of studying.

All that said, i believe the "95% unknown" is actually 3% known, of the known universe (not the unknown), which is an estimate anyway. Its not information you can use to prove or disprove or (accurately) demonstrate anything.

Science is like a mountain. The further you climb, the larger you realize that Mount Astrophysics is.

But science not knowing a lot is no excuse for fallacious arguments like "science doesnt everything" bullshit to justify your pet hypothesis, be it FTL travel, god, or some other similar nonsense.

While there might be things we will never entirely understand, the pursuit of understanding is not futile.

Indeed, every single discovery we make. Not only unravels more mysteries to discover. But each step of the way, can also be applied in useful ways.

The universe? We don't even know about earth yet, for instance we have absolutely no idea what's at the bottom of our deep oceans yet so how can we possibly know anymore about the universe as a whole?

I believe in science passionately but I'm intelligent enough to also know we haven't even scratched the surface of what 'reality' really is.

Currently human on average only use 10% of their brain capacity. When we evolve to the point we are using the majority of our brain our understanding of things beyond our capacity will become clear to us.

Yes. If you think about it all our knowledge comes from some sort of observation being directly with our senses or through the help of technology. But the results of that technological observation also have to be perceived with our senses. We have 5 senses and we know that even those are limited to a range of the spectrum of data that such a sense could access. So it's pretty obvious that we are quite ignorant. All we know comes from 5 pretty limited senses from a particular point of view on the entire universe: Earth. We can't even change location slightly in Universe terms to look at stuff from other angle. That is like looking out of the window of your room for your whole life and expecting to understand the whole world by what you see there. Imagine if the window had no road in front, we could never even see a car and how would we know cars even exist? We are really limited and ignorant after all but then again that makes science the more interesting.

That's a badly understood thing. We don't only use 10% of our brain. What that means is that we use a portion of all the functions our brain has at any given time because we don't need the rest of those functions at that particular time. Our human brain is actually a highly optimized machine, one of the most optimized brains in the animal kingdom if not the most optimized already.

I think are ability to iteratively accumulate knowledge is something that sets us apart, but I agree, lots we still don't understand.

I'm sure people 300 years ago thought they knew what was going on with the world, and I'm sure 300 years from now, people will look back and laugh at our ignorance of discoveries yet to be made

Considering the size of the universe and the infinite complexity of matter it's not surprising to me we have so much to learn about the universe. It'll take an almost infinite number of lifetimes for us to understand everything there is to understand.

@dakur: he only uses 0.5 %

lmao you may only use 10% but no, the average human brain does not only use 10% of its capacity. That's a myth and junk science debunked after a 10 second Google search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth

We as a species have the ability to pass along everything we know so future generations don't have to rediscover the same things we toiled to discover. If the pursuit was honest, even an incorrect understanding of the subject can lead to actual discovery.

There's a straight line from alchemy to atomic theory, for instance.

Actually, that's not always true. Some of the most revolutionary ideas and concepts have met with rabid opposition by the scientific community. People get stuck in their ways and often fail to see novel ideas or approaches.

With Cern's research, I would say that we are a lot closer then some people think.

Example?

So, here's the thing with this. This ends up being scientific theory versus scientific theory (there is nothing outside of science that brings us revolutionary anything), unless you're getting into the days when alchemy was considered scientific, and if you're doing that then you're not really being honest about it as these "instances" tended to be either alchemy or what little scientific knowledge we had but mixed with the catholic church laws.... BUT, we almost never saw these things challenged because it equaled death or life time imprisonment because you were then challenging gods word or creations.

Thats not accurate, not in the way that you meant anyway. The human brain will, to simply explain it, activate/deactivate parts when and where they are needed or not needed. But rest assured that all parts are actually functioning. The brain has different parts controlling and monitoring different things. You seriously cannot expect a brain to use 100% of its capacity and function, you'll "OVERHEAT!". Its functioning this way to be as efficient as possible.

Do you get this idea from that scarlett johansson's movie?

WRT OP, its never a futile endeavour to pursue scientific understanding and knowledge, every little bit we discovered can and has been put to further benefit human existence. But as that astrophysicist said, if we can acknowledge that we will never make a "smart cat speak the french language" then we must also accept that our brain will also be limited in its understanding in certain, possibly a whole lot of things. Its an unfortunate fact that we have to come to terms with.

Well, the gentlemen on NPR listed several examples of how stubborn the scientific community can be to ideas that challenge their current status quo, but I cant think of them off the top of my head. But that doesnt shock me as most people resist new and novel concepts.

I think scientists get big heads and feel comfortable that their estimations are fact. The problem with science is that it doesn't take anything into consideration unless it's proven, or makes other guesses make sense. What about those things that might be difficult for us to even begin to fathom, or those things far beyond our comprehension? We are sitting on our little blue and green orb, circling a sun alongside 8 other rocks and their satellites which we have barely examined - and making guesses about the chemical makeup of planets lightyears away.

I'm excited for future scientists who are going to learn and discover so many great things about our universe in the future. I'm really bummed that I won't be around to see what we discover in the next 100 years.

Discovery is probably humanities best trait. To ask questions and then go off and find the answer which lead to greater and more complex questions.

we don't know therefore God derpity derp

Splitting an atom 2000 years ago was beyond human comprehension. Who needs science books when we have bibles.

yup. using 100% of your brain at once is basically having an epileptic seizure.

on topic. we do know a great deal about many things so we get some credit for that. as long as humans remain humble about what they do not know and continue to pursue the unknown, we'll do well.

suppose there is already an alien race trying to communicate w/ us and we just don't see it? it's entirely possible right now.

imagine you met a species that whose lifespan was a billion years and spoke a language we could decipher but took a month to utter one syllable. how long ( if ever ) would it take us to figure out they're even talking to us at all?

Well obviously. But we are working hard to change that.

They tend to do this when there is little to no evidence to suggest the denial and acceptance of other things is the direction to go in. Even if something ends up being correct, we end up finding out its correct because it goes through a process of challenges that it had not previously gone through.

NPR likes doing stuff like this, a few years ago they brought in some guy who was talking about telepathy and things like this, and why "science" does not consider it as real and why cant they just be open to it and blah blah blah. This is because NPR likes to bring on like... anthropologists to talk about these subjects. People who don't really understand why the hard sciences need to be able to accept or not, these claims and why they dont even begin to take them seriously.

There is also the separation between what individual "scientists" maybe believe versus what they'd be willing to publish a paper on. The publishing of papers is really what confirms things and adds to our knowledge base. And many physicists who do a lot of peer review, might say something like they think string theory is legit and real, but would not never publish anything on it because as they will always say, they dont know for certain because there is not enough evidence for that conclusion.

@br0kenrabbit said:

@comp_atkins said:

suppose there is already an alien race trying to communicate w/ us and we just don't see it? it's entirely possible right now.

imagine you met a species that whose lifespan was a billion years and spoke a language we could decipher but took a month to utter one syllable. how long ( if ever ) would it take us to figure out they're even talking to us at all?

i don't know what that is

@comp_atkins said:

i don't know what that is

It's called a book. It's a bunch of pages of paper bound on one end so that it opens from the right allowing each individual page to be read.

But what you said is basically the story concept of the book above. of course, it's the aliens who live quickly and the humans who appear slow.

@br0kenrabbit said:

@comp_atkins said:

i don't know what that is

It's called a book. It's a bunch of pages of paper bound on one end so that it opens from the right allowing each individual page to be read.

But what you said is basically the story concept of the book above. of course, it's the aliens who live quickly and the humans who appear slow.

everyone's a smartass

They used to make the same statements about scientists playing with pieces of glass while people died of hunger a few centuries ago.

Think about this...matter is energy, just in a concentrated form. Science can give you a definition of what energy does, but not what it is. And then your perceptions really depend on your field of context. Example, 99 percent of so called solid matter is empty space. Depends how closely you are looking.

Why am I not surprised you believed that myth.