I found recently that scientists estimate at least 90% of our universe is made of dark matter and energy: invisible, untouchable, undetectable.
How can we claim to know much about our universe, when over 90% is entirely beyond our comprehension? For all we know dark matter might have supernatural properties beyond our imagination, and yet, we have a condescending approach to anything that cannot be scientifically explained.
Don’t get me wrong: I am a strong believer in the scientific method and the burden of proof does belong to supporters of new theories if we don’t want to be stuck in a Flying Spaghetti Monster paradox, where the burden of proof is on the skeptics!
Yet, our inability to even perceive or interact with over 90% of our universe dwarfs every piece of knowledge we have -or even just think to have- about it.
In that 90% there could be another dimension for example… or possibly 10 other dimensions, each with their different type of dark matters all mutually invisible.
There could be flying spaghetti monsters, and everything we ever imagined, some sort of Hyperuranion like that proposed by Plato. What I am trying to say is that the dark matter could have supernatural properties behind our imagination.
What is even more interesting is that we know so little about it that we may even be unable to explore that space with the tools at our disposal today to practice knowledge.
For example we may take for granted the idea that words and concepts have a definition, but this is only a relatively “new” invention that we owe to Socrates.
It was hard for me to grasp, and I remember this little story clarified things immensely:
Socrates would often ask “what is a sailor”, and people would answer “Ulysses is a sailor”. Not content, Socrate would insist: “yes, but what is a sailor”, but failing to understand the question, they would ask back “what do you mean? Ulysses is a sailor”.
It could be apocryphal, but there is an obvious take home here: the ability to abstract our thought and answer “a person who works on a boat”, is not biologically granted, but culturally transmitted, on par with the invention of the wheel, or the discovery of electricity.
Our Greek ancestors, prior to that discovery would have found impossible to think syllogistically, or to develop logic, which lays the foundation for many branches of mathematics and science… in short: they wouldn’t have had the means to know the existence of black holes, for example.
The mere fact that we have been practicing knowledge following the same basic paradigm for over 2 thousand years, cannot make us so arrogant as to think that there is no other way that we haven’t yet discovered and that will enable us to open unexpected doors to our knowledge and perception of the universe around us.
Leave a Reply