Just Curious
We’re drowning in information but we don’t know diddly. For a few thousands years we’ve labored tirelessly to fill our libraries and databases with notions, theories, observations, opinions, wishes, dreams, passionate outcries, wild imaginings, shameful whining, obstinate dogma, and pointless babble — but we still don’t know how we got on this rock or how we’re supposed to comport ourselves while we’re here.
Spiral Galaxy, courtesy of NASA
We don’t know the most fundamental things. Physicists are unable to explain why, for instance , galaxies continue to fly away from one another at an accelerating rate, in defiance of everything known of gravitational law – and of every other natural law. They decided it was caused by something they would call “dark energy.” But what is Dark Energy? Nobody knows. The laws of nature as we know them do not apply to it. [This according to an article in the June 3, 2008 edition of the New York Times -- read it here.]
Nor do they apply to the weighty mystery of something they have named Dark Matter. Physicists know (but I don’t know how they know) that the weight of the universe is composed of 74 percent Dark Energy and a mere four percent of atoms. The remaining 22 percent? Well, that’s something else. Nobody knows what. They call it Dark Matter.
A final example: nobody can explain why at some point early in the development of an embryo one cell divides from another and begins to develop into a brain. The biologist Lewis Thomas was obsessed with this mystery. “No one,” he wrote, “has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in my life can ever be so puzzling. If anyone does succeed in explaining it, within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out.”
It occurs to me that in a universe of unknowns the most admirable human quality is our urge to know. We can learn the names of things, study the works of great minds, gather insights into laws, systems, and connections that seem to hold things together, and with diligent application maybe see a little deeper into the mysteries of the universe. But it has to start with curiosity. And as anyone knows who remembers even a little what it was like to be a child, curiosity begins with wonder.
Never before has it been so easy to satisfy curiosity. Are you curious to know which element is the most common in the universe? How many taste buds are on a tongue? The difference between bourbon and whisky? Ask Google. In a few seconds, like magic, you have the answer.
So here’s the question of the day: Has instant access to information made us less curious or more? Tell me what you think.
As a species, we are probably about as curious as we ever were. I would give a different answer to our most admirable quality, though. Curiosity is part of it, but the bigger answer (this, of course, is my opinion!) is imagination. It is imagination that drives the curiosity. It is also imagination that allows us to perform the thought experiment of putting ourselves in another person’s place, which is the basis for ethics. With curiosity alone, we might devise all manner of inhumane and dastardly experiments; moral imagination along with scientific curiosity requires us sometimes to limit the insatiable reach of curiosity’s probe. At least, this is true for most human beings. Sometimes I wonder about science.
Thanks, P.J. I agree with you about imagination. And after further consideration, I’d drop curiosity even further down the list and suggest that our second most admirable quality is the way we rally in crises.
When I ask Google I end up with more answers than I would have thought possible and more questions than I had when I started, but that’s just me. Secretly I suspect Wikipedia of being the source of Dark Matter, yet I cannot leave it alone any more than I can leave a bag of chocolate chips intact.
When I was little everyone in my family believed with touching faith that if we found it in a book in a library, it was true. None of us believes that anymore, which is a sort of progress. I vote for healthy skepticism as one of our saving graces, right up there with imagination and the ability to rally in a crisis. I wonder, though, whether the frog in a pot of barely simmering water thinks of itself as in a crisis situation or a spa?
Jerry,
Great post and very topical—just a few days ago the NY Times ran a story on the 52 year experience that just proved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/space/05gravity.html. With time, energy and (in this case) a lot of money; many of the mysteries of the universe are being unravelled. That said, I think it’s comforting to know that we’ll never know everything and with every discovery there come new questions. I always thought our desire to ask “WHY” and search for answers is what makes us a unique species.