I recently heard a passing stat on NPR that could not be ignored. A recent science show noted that “Dark Matter” was 96% of the universe. A quick interwebnets check noted that a book, “The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality” was written in 2011 by Richard Panek – old news.
This stark confirmation of a creep up in the acknowledged quantity of the twinned “Dark”’s – Matter and Energy underscored that they are perhaps the most sublimely human fudge since Original Sin.
Its evident to me that a lot of humans want specific knowledge without adequate evidence to support it – often to the point of obsessional preoccupation. Rather than shrug our shoulders when confronted with deep ambiguity and live our lives, humans tend to toss in the “quiet desperation” part into that living.
We do not know, really, why we can so easily hate ourselves, do stupid things or just have no central purpose in life. In trying to understand that vacuum some ancient musers were inspired (by God or guilt) to envision a cosmic break from Perfection involving a rib, an apple and a snake
The dark side that prompted the proffering of Original Sin as a way to deal with fundamental holes in the meaning of our lives has, to me, similarities to the proffering of Dark Matter in the face of a huge absence of measureables in the physical universe. Both respond with primal desperation to make sense of our overwhelming ignorance.
Original Sin is a frame of reference that should allow me to find peace when I fall short of my best hopes and expectations. But its message is insufficient to provide solace or forbearance. The story’s precision in symbols and metaphors is in inverse proportion to the incalculable ambiguity of why we aren’t all heroin addicts who kill each other for food.
But our need for specificity, for measureables – like the 10 Commandments or Dark Matter – seems to be as essential for our emotional survival as finding love.
In the world of science trillions upon trillions of measureables are collected in an accelerating crescendo of data engorgement with each passing day. But in truth, the data has opened up a clear window of our overwhelming ignorance that requires infinitely more data – or, perhaps, acceptance of our ignorance.
In 1933, Fritz Zwicky found that the forces he measured in the observable universe were bizarrely greater than what the measured matter in the universe could induce. A long succession of extreme mental measures have ensued, but with each crushing load of data derived from newer and better technologies have made the non-observable universe grow and grow.
So many forces are observed with so little evident matter or energy or anything to support their presence, humans feel compelled to propose that 96% of the universe is there in some form we need to define, just not in a form we can measure. So the most brilliant among us desperately invent a narrative using billions of data points as undergirding, but without a single data point describing the subject of the narrative itself.
My take is that the billions of data points that are humans on this earth are the parallel data points in the creation of a narrative that reveals the answers to the “why’s” of our lives.
In both the supremely personal and sublimely universal realms, humans seem hard-wired to fill in the gaps with a certitude that denies the reality of our ignorance.
When someone kills dozens of people on a Scandinavian island or in a Colorado movie theater, we want to define the exact reasons – brain wiring, cultural incompetence, parental malfeasance, guns being too available – we want to know, know, “Why?”
Politicians, clerics and psychologists step up to provide remedies – as if the heart of darkness we all have has a fix that can be crafted by the same hands that can wreak havoc or wreck our self worth at the drop of a psychotic break.
80 years of extreme efforts to fill Zwicky’s hole have only revised the measure of our ignorance up to 96% from somewhere around 80% in the 1980’s when the Hubble telescope and all the enhancements of computerized analysis laid waste to previous theories. The more we know, the more we discover we know even less than we thought.
This week , another scientific fudge, “Junk DNA”, suddenly went from junk to “crucial”. It seems that when first plotted the human genome only had 2% “active” elements, with 98% of its material without obvious purpose. Perhaps it was just refuse carried along by evolution, or just unusable stuff from other organisms that needed it that was simply passed along as the great tree of life split off branches from a common trunk. If we could not measure its usefulness we assumed it had no use.
Well, after researching it for a decade or so, this “junk” now seems to be a huge array of switches that allow unspecific cells to “get real” – become skin, or bone or nose hairs. Unlike the universe or the human heart, the DNA machine is made of measureable components. We can, over time, “know” it.
But we felt compelled to call what did not know “Junk”, because it’s not just nature that abhors a vacuum, it’s our sense of control. We try to fill that void by calling the unknown “Junk” or Dark” or in the case of the Higgs-Boson Particle “God”.
Truth lives in a lot of places – but we often just cannot seem to find out exactly where.
We “know” we are not meaningless, we “know” we want to do the right thing, we “know” that these desires must be able to be understood – and to be understood there must be measureables. Your resume, your net worth, the college your kid goes to, your sex life, your politics, your religion, your theory of what-percentage-of-what-energy-has-what-implicit-realities-in-the-universe all attempt to measure what is probably not measurable.
Other than our ultimate Big Measureable (death), perhaps the only Measure one we cannot buy, learn, or share is what we measure alone, within ourselves, listening. Like the aged Private Ryan, we just want to know if we have led a good life.
Perhaps if we can name the things that seem to be withheld from us “junk”, “dark” or “god” we can wrap some part of our minds around their meaning.
But our incoherently inscrutable side, somehow present in the 96% that seems unknowable within us, can never be fully understood and will never cease to exist. Our own “Dark Energy” is more mysterious than the absurdly huge fudge factor that rationalizes our collective inability to measure much in the universe.
But we won’t stop measuring…
Please let me know if you’re looking for a author for your site. You have some really good articles and I believe I would be a good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d absolutely love to write some material for
your blog in exchange for a link back to mine.
Please send me an email if interested. Cheers!
Original Sin is the Ego, which is in the body, and which tries to separate us and make us think the body and the material world are the sum total of reality.
Some places it is still “Mud Season”. In DC, the cherry blossoms have exploded. Here, it is Neither Time. A lingering chill in Nutmeg Land has has been a tight chastity belt on the ecstasy of spring. Sure, there are buds, a sprout or twelve, but no leaves. There are illegitimate, isolated flowers, but no spring.
“If religion continues to church-it-up in pretense and inside baseball, we become like Gilbert and Sullivan operettas: great good stuff, beloved by an ever-shrinking, self-congratulating group of lovely people.”
Anecdotes are history. Sort of. In theory my grandfather played professional soccer in Brooklyn in 1903. No record, but there weren’t many of much, there, then.
Before the Christian Reformation 500 years ago the church was the editor of western civilization’s relationship with God. Martin Luther was just a human who saw beyond the institution that tried to define God for him, and everyone else. For Luther, and me, faith is intimately universal. Direct relationship transforms understanding.
I know this because my father always had August off. Every New York City lawyer did, then. My father had a fully travelable family, three children, me the youngest soon or just at 5: two well dressed, cropped others, the eldest just 15, and his snappy wife.
But then, at the Spring Solstice, a 61.5 year old blood tube decided it’s inadequate middle layer had performed as long as it could: it blew, the tube blew, part of my brain was flooded and I lost (only) balance.
Encouraging bad behavior is at the root of the human condition.
Teaching design three half days a week, (and prepping for almost as much time) I must work 7 days a week, or everything suffers. Fortunately, my children are grown and away at great distance from us, and my wife has a full time career and has a social life independent of our relationship. So I can abuse both.
It was snowing so hard that the 10 inches on the ground seemed like a warning. I had been in the office for 10 hours and had 1/2 hour of light left. So I walked.
It took 15 minutes, normally t10. But it took longer because I said hi to some old friends
My vision ended my application to be considered for the Navy ROTC program. My vision was 20-40, and the program, during the Vietnam War that was still raging, only wanted those who could be pilots, thus needed 20-20 vision for consideration. I asked for a waiver, and was denied.
7 weeks ago we did not have a clue. It was February. Those Chinese had a problem, again, but it was not our problem. And Wednesday was Ash Wednesday. I was buying Birthday Books for my wife, and launched on a mission.
WHAT IS GONE IS BACK AGAIN Bruce Barber and I went to high school together 45 years ago: Over the last decade, Bruce has included me in his creative machinations, both of us trying to find connection to the world at a time of change and opportunity: This is a third iteration of a very human effort:
(click here to read more)
this came out 15 minutes ago:
http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/65997-new-theory-unifies-dark-matter-and-dark-energy
Hello, for all time i used to check web site posts here early in the daylight, for the
reason that i enjoy to learn more and more.
Thanks,
Please let me know if you’re looking for a author for your site. You have some really good articles and I believe I would be a good asset. If you ever want to take some of the load off, I’d absolutely love to write some material for
your blog in exchange for a link back to mine.
Please send me an email if interested. Cheers!
Original Sin is the Ego, which is in the body, and which tries to separate us and make us think the body and the material world are the sum total of reality.