We all want to know where to see April’s rare total solar eclipse. And many of us have enough astronomy knowledge to harbor a list of intriguing off-planet issues. Like, whether extraterrestrials are swimming in the warm salty oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
But in hush-hush astrophysics circles there are seldom discussed lists of impenetrable cosmic mysteries. These are the tantalizing enigmas that will never be addressed in our lives. And since few of us want to spin our wheels pointlessly attempting to climb futility boulevard, it’s worth a few minutes contemplating the unknowable.
Especially since this is genuinely cool stuff. After all, just a few centuries ago no one knew why the wind blows. Until the Italian Torricelli correctly explained it, the abrupt onsets and cessations of gusty breezes were bathed in mystery.
Torricelli explained that the Sun’s heat made air lighter, causing it to rise, and then the simple spin of our world together with obstacles like mountains created directional patterns. It clarified why hot afternoons were usually breezier than cool, stable nights.
Our minds love stuff like that. Which is why most of us will enjoy learning whether places with vast water pools like the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn generated living organisms the way Earth has done with our own aquatic history.
But some mysteries are more than merely difficult. They’re downright impossible. Shouldn’t we know what they are? Well, ever since Wehner Heisenberg and other quantum theory originators singled it out a century ago, one topic explored on this page last month remained impenetrable. That is, consciousness. Somehow, chemical elements like carbon and oxygen — which are themselves well understood — managed to acquire experience. How did combinations of insensate molecules gain the ability to feel things, like the smell of burnt toast?
Awareness is so unfathomable it’s mostly ignored by neurologists, beyond simple issues such as what brain sections are involved with which specific sensory experiences. But consciousness sounds so woo-woo and hippie-like it’s probably better to jump to other unknowable areas.
One, recently explored on this page, is nonlocality, meaning visible connections between parts of the cosmos that are too far apart to be capable of exhibiting interactions. We’re talking about instantaneous communications or effects, which is no small thing. Science has no explanations for this.
Another such imponderable is time. Einstein revealed that time does not exist as a stand-alone item, and seems more akin to our numbering systems — a way our minds create order. Asking whether time has an independent reality is like asking whether “three” has an independent reality. Change is real, but do changes unfold within the confines of an actual separate dimension, or is time a neural organizational tool like roman numerals on a sundial?
It also opens the door to endless torment. Once we give time any whiff of an independent reality, we start asking whether the universe began at a particular natal moment — the sort of question that can never be answered. For if the cosmos emerged at a specific point 13.8 billion years ago, what were the antecedent conditions? And what created that? The way our thoughts work, through symbolism, where the word fire is not actual fire, automatically creates insoluble setups, of which the birth of everything is a good example.
Galaxies continuing infinitely versus any sort of cosmic architecture is another example, and it becomes clear that answers are not possible for such inquiries because logic’s nature itself prevents it. Those who have experienced the “enlightenment” state revered by Eastern mysticism know that complete certainty about the universe and reality are indeed available, but not through mentation.
As an interim step for those who see math and logic as the only reliable knowledge tools, one might begin with a little self-gentleness and torment-limitation by simply isolating the durably vexing cosmic issues into separate categories labeled soluble and insoluble.
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