The issues facing modern physics are so baffling that they\u2019ve crossed a threshold and now fascinate the general public. We laymen have very little at stake, personally speaking, when scientists argue over the Big Bang\u2014without advanced mathematical training, it\u2019s all but impossible to follow the arguments. But we do have a stake when the universe starts to disappear, as it is doing right this minute.<\/p>\n
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The cosmic vanishing act began, approximately, when dark matter and dark energy showed up on the radar of cosmology. \u201cDark\u201d is a misleading term, because the space between the stars is pitch black, but it isn\u2019t dark in the way that dark matter and energy are. They are dark as in totally mysterious. No light is given off by them, or any known form of energy we associate with the universe. They cannot be measured, and so far as anyone can guess, dark matter is probably not constituted of anything resembling atoms or subatomic particles.<\/p>\n
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The reason that dark matter and energy are important is arcane to the layman, having to do with the fact that instead of moving apart at a constant rate or slowing down, the galaxies are accelerating as they move away from each other. This acceleration defies gravity, so at the very least dark energy is some species of antigravity (to put it in very general terms\u2014the actual nature of this unknown force is complex, arcane, and much speculated over).<\/p>\n
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Even knowing this, you may shrug your shoulders and ignore such an abstruse problem, until you discover that only around 4% of the created universe is accounted for by the matter and energy visible to the eye or to scientific instruments, bound up in galaxies and interstellar dust. The vast majority, around 96% is dark, hence unknown. Far beyond the abstractions of scientific theory, the known and knowable universe slipped out of reach\u2014that\u2019s the cosmic vanishing act.<\/p>\n
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Annoyed physicists can attach comments to the effect that a mere layman has no business poking his ignorant nose into their profession, a line of inquiry where quantum mechanics is boasted of as the most precise theory in scientific history.\u00a0 Which is laudable, but it does seem as if someone has patched a hole in a flat tire and claims to have built the whole car. As headlines are grabbed by the discoveries made at billion-dollar particle accelerators, the whole fabric of reality is being shredded to tatters.<\/p>\n
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If you have heard the terms multiverse, string theory, superstring theory, and dark matter and energy, you need to realize the unmentioned problems with all of them:<\/p>\n
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These aren\u2019t just theoretical difficulties. What we are finding out is that reality isn\u2019t what science has been describing. Instead, science has been relying on an assumption that measuring something and fitting it into a neat mathematical model is the same as knowing what\u2019s real. This is like a deaf person examining a graph of the sound frequencies associated with Beethoven\u2019s Fifth Symphony and claiming that he knows the music. The fact that you have a map in your hands doesn\u2019t mean you have experienced the territory.<\/p>\n
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Someone should have predicted the vanishing universe long ago. The famous physicist-astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington is often quoted as saying, \u201cSomething unknown is doing we don’t know what.” These words are generally taken as a quip from an era decades ago before physics had figured out so much about the cosmos that a Theory of Everything was just around the corner. But the quip should be taken soberly. Even a confident mind like Stephen Hawking has more or less given up on the Theory of Everything, settling for a patchwork of smaller theories that will serve to explain local domains of physics.<\/p>\n
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Yet the obvious point to be drawn isn\u2019t technical and requires no Oxbridge postgraduate degrees: Reality is still unknown. The more one contemplates this strange situation, the more uneasy the situation becomes.<\/p>\n
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Aren\u2019t all these subatomic particles getting us closer to the nature of matter and energy? No, because at bottom, matter isn\u2019t material. It isn\u2019t tangible or visible.<\/p>\n
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Doesn\u2019t scientific research count for anything? That depends. If most of the universe is totally inconceivable\u2014or even well hidden\u2014empirical data has reached its limit. The so-called subempirical domain may be running the whole show.<\/p>\n
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But surely the scientific method is the greatest tool ever devised by the rational mind. It has gotten us where we are today, at the height of understanding Nature, hasn\u2019t it? Dubious. All theories ae right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude.\u00a0 The scientific method, with its basis in reducing difficult problems to manageable bits and pieces that can be explicated, happens to exclude consciousness. It fails to entertain that we haven\u2019t the slightest idea how the brain\u2019s gray matter produces the mind. There is no biological basis for thinking. No one knows what preceded the Big Bang, if that\u2019s even a meaningful question, since the Big Bang may be the beginning of time and space as we know it.<\/p>\n
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These aren\u2019t just gaps in a fabric that needs mending and more weaving. They strike at the false assumption that if you measure a thing, you know the thing. Reality can\u2019t be modeled; it\u2019s infinite, every-changing, mostly hidden from view, based on inconceivable beginnings, and at times walled off even from mathematics, the primary language of science.<\/p>\n
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So what\u2019s next? In practical terms, the world will crank along doing what it\u2019s already doing, and this inertia applies to science too. No doubt 99% of practicing scientists go to work without considering any of the points I\u2019ve raised. Why bother\u2014the whole thing sounds like metaphysics, which 20th<\/sup>-century science assumed was dead and buried.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What matters isn\u2019t so much the fate of science, which has created its own self-sustained world. But it\u2019s unsettling to realize that, \u201cSomething unknown is doing we don’t know what.” More than unsettling. Humans want to know what\u2019s real and what\u2019s not. Our minds depend on it, and it\u2019s with our minds that we are human. Until the mind can touch reality and be sure that it\u2019s not an illusion, the human project has been stalled, and scientific reassurances aren\u2019t going to help us move forward again.<\/p>\n Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 80 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers. He serves as the founder of The\u00a0<\/em>Chopra Foundation<\/a>\u00a0and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing. His latest book is\u00a0<\/em>The 13th Disciple: A Spiritual Adventure<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The issues facing modern physics are so baffling that they\u2019ve crossed a threshold and now fascinate the general public. We laymen have very little at stake, personally speaking, when scientists argue over the Big Bang\u2014without advanced mathematical training, it\u2019s all but impossible to follow the arguments. But we do have a stake when the universe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[361,362,834,819],"class_list":["post-2192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consciousness","tag-big-bang","tag-cosmology","tag-dark-energy","tag-dark-matter"],"yoast_head":"\n