As mankind’s knowledge continues to expand the scale of our physical existence finds a smaller and smaller place in time and distance. Who doesn’t love a little existential irony?
Since the1920’s we knew that the universe was expanding. Since 1998 we discovered that that expansion is speeding up due to the force of dark energy, a word we’ve given to a force that we can’t explain yet.
It seems the bigger a space we envision the bigger the questions (bigger in that the mystery covers more and more space). It’s like clearing a forest; the bigger the open space the more there is to maintain. The calm that religion can install within us weaves a tighter rope between the physical reality of our small individual space with a bigger picture. Yet the better we comprehend that physical reality the more that rope is stretched and thinned. The scientific endeavor has pushed out the edges of the universe out in time and distance. Copernicus showed that Earth is not the center of the stars and Sun. Then we learned that our solar system isn’t even at the middle of our galaxy. Edwin Hubble (and latter his namesake) discovered that our entire galaxy is but one in approximately 200 billion. Physics has taken us back to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, about 13.75 billion years ago. Our brain expansion seems merely a placemark to hold bigger and bigger questions.
Like that we can only account for 7% of a the universes mass as we understand the laws of gravity. Either we don’t understand gravity on a galactic scale or 94% of the universe has in it something we can’t measure.* Lets just call it one big dark question. Or the centuries-long debate on if light is a wave or a particle settled on by declaring it both. At some point we had to stop questioning everything we see.
Like the red shift itself our body of knowledge expands, pressing against the edges of what we don’t know. Our sense of placement in the physical universe scales smaller as we better the measurement on how bigger it is. As we garner a deeper and clearer understanding of the past a human lifetime in it gets smaller and smaller. The price of our expanding brains? Learning that our place in the time/space continuum is just a tiny corner where we set and observe what has already happened. As history layers on names and accomplishments our moment shrinks to even briefer a description.
Big ideas that scan the universe perched from the smallest of places. Our entire life’s understanding of it woven in 1400 grams of synaptic threading. And sitting just outside of 7mm of skull plate everything else.
*If I could propose a theory on dark energy it would start with the Big Bang. The assumption is that the creation of time/space in a gravitational field is uniform. I’d guess that it’s not, that dark energy is actually just “irregularities” in the time/space field left over from the matter/anti-matter split in the Big Bang. Are these massive open spaces cold enough to take on quantum charateristics? Of course the real answer will likely be a little vague. Quantum mechanics has taught us that a definitive answer is somewhat an illusion, that outcomes are merely a range of probability of possible outcomes.
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