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Opinion | The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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I'd compare this to our understanding of evolution and the frequent table-flipping discoveries involved. We thought we had an idea pretty well understood. Yet we keep learning that while the idea itself is solid, our ability to predict how things worked was too simplistic. So it goes when we look into the past (I'm a history nerd by hobby, so this is how it makes sense to me).
Sort of. The broad dynamic is essentially the same, though evolution is a comparatively tiny idea compared to anything that might come out of cosmology.
That’s a good illustration of my point though. Think about the complexities and the table-flipping along the way to our current understanding of evolution, then expand that out - we’re not just addressing the mechanisms by which specific forms of life come to be on this specific planet, but the fundamental nature and history of an incomprehensibly vast universe.
When we know - we’ve demonstrated to ourselves repeatedly - that we still don’t even fully grasp the facts regarding something as relatively mundane and constrained as the origin and differentiation of species of life, it should drive home how ludicrous it is to believe that we’ve managed to grasp the facts regarding the origin and history of the universe as a whole.