Stranger than Fiction

 I spent the day on other things and didn't write anything new.  However, since you asked, here is one of the essays I wrote at "Writer's Camp" (aka The Clearing at Ellison Bay) last summer.  Enjoy

Stranger than Fiction

Five billion years ago, in a very distant part of the universe, two black holes collided, creating a ripples in spacetime, ripples that we call gravitational waves.  These waves travel at the speed of light, but even so, by the time they were detected in July 2017, that collision was ancient history -- occurring long before our solar system was formed, before life of any sort developed on earth, and certainly before humans began their day in the sun.  No one can see a gravitational wave.  No one can feel, taste, smell or hear a gravitational wave.  Yet, 20^th century scientists predicted their existence and had the imagination to figure out how to detect their presence.

A surprising number of things happen outside our sensory perception.  As you go about your daily business, you are under constant physical assault.  In any given second,  trillions of neutrinos pass through your body and millions upon millions of air molecules bombard your skin, each traveling at 1000 mph.   We are unperturbed by all of this because our five senses have evolved to ensure our survival-- to hunt for prey, and avoid being prey, to find a mate and to be a mate, but not to probe the vastness of the cosmos or motion on the atomic scale.

We humans, however, are very crafty creatures and have developed instruments to see well beyond our senses. Telescopes see deep into the universe; and microscopes reveal worlds too tiny for us to see. We build detectors that find neutrinos and gravitational waves.  All these instruments rely on the interaction of matter with some kind of light.  With these tools we have seen billions of years into the past, and even imaged individual atoms.

It looks like we have it covered.  Between our senses and our impressive arsenal of scientific tools we can probe the very big, the very small, and everything in between.   I guess we can pack up our calculators.

Whoah, Captain Know-it-all, not so fast.

The universe has a few tricks up her sleeve.  Astrophysicists have identified some strange gravitational effects that can’t be explained within our current models.  These pesky little anomalies either require a whole new theory of gravity or imply that the universe contains a vast amount of matter that has not been observed.   Whatever this matter is, it does not interact with light and so cannot be probed, even with our most sophisticated methods.   For this reason, it is called ‘Dark Matter’ and is a total mystery.   A pretty important mystery -- physicists suggest that this unexplained dark matter is about 85% of all matter.  If you count dark matter’s equally mysterious cousin, Dark Energy, we are blind to 95% of the universe.

I don’t know about you, but being blind to 95% of the universe fills me with awe, excitement,  and quite honestly, trepidation.

If we could look at what we can’t see, what would we find?

In 1884, mathematician Edwin Abbott, wrote the novel “Flatland” about a country occupied by two-dimensional shapes--triangles, squares, etc.--that are constrained to skitter around in an entirely flat world. Things can move forward, backwards, left, right or on a diagonal, but not up or down.  Think of sliding pennies on a table, without lifting them, and you’ll have the right idea. 

When a sphere drops into Flatland from three-dimensional space, it seems to materialize out of nowhere, like a supernatural being. This inexplicable event provides a glimpse that beyond the boundaries of Flatland lies a whole different reality.

The existence of dark matter also provides a glimpse of a different reality beyond the boundaries of scientific measurement, despite all our sophisticated instruments.

As it turns out, our understanding of the universe is cruelly limited.

Humans are explorers and discoverers, seeking knowledge and understanding.  Scientists discover the rules that govern the universe through experimentation. Theologians explore the nature of the divine, recognizing that humans are limited and can never see or fully understand God.  As I scientist, I have always believed that science will ultimately reveal the full nature of the physical universe, but I reluctantly acknowledge that I may be wrong.  Maybe we will figure out some way to probe the perversity of dark matter and energy.  But, the theologians may be right;  there may be mysteries that are simply unknowable and humans may remain completely blind to the vast majority of existence.