Astronomers with sub-stantial audiences are routinely swamped with questions. The same questions over and over, year after year. Somehow your pal Bob was long ago pulled into that group that gets ongoing stacks of mail, even though I never hosted a single TV show. It happened simply by being the sole astronomy columnist in Discover magazine for 20 years, the astronomy editor of the Old Farmers Almanac since the ‘80’s, a guest on such TV shows as Today with Katie Couric and the Tonight Show with David Letterman, and a weekly producer and host of broadcasts during NPR’s Weekend Edition. Publishing a dozen books contributed to the correspondence, which duplicates the questions thrown my way on call-in shows.
It happens because people imagine that astronomers have an “inside take” on profound cosmic issues. Some exploit the resulting air time to promulgate personal opinions. Neil Degrasse Tyson, for example, lectures for atheist organizations and likes to promote the view that religions keep setting back science progress. Like Carl Sagan before him, he reminds us that the Bible insists our Earth is motionless and lies at the center of the universe. I understand their pique; I’m still not fully over the teenage horror I suffered when I first read an eyewitness account from 1600, of the screams from poor Giordano Bruno as he was being burnt at the stake for saying there might be life on planets orbiting other stars.
Still, I’m turned off by those who belittle the possibility of a formless intelligence underlying the cosmos. That’s enough to give offense to those convinced that everything from brain architecture to kitten playfulness is ultimately the result of random chemical activity and its genetic changes, because everything happens strictly by chance.
Granted, random mutations are indeed the underlying explanation for processes such as evolution, which clarifies things like long giraffe necks. But taking that ball and running with it in every academic direction so that school kids are given randomness, chance, and haphazard chemical behavior as the “explanation” for every deep puzzle seems silly. And lazy. Whatever happened to “We don’t know?”
I’m way off-topic. The real subject is: What are you most obsessed with learning? If you could push a button and have any question answered, what would it be? And can science or some other methodology provide decisive answers to those most-often-asked questions such as: Is there life elsewhere? Is there conscious awareness after your body dies? How did the cosmos begin? How far does stuff extend beyond the observable universe? Might the cosmos be infinite in extent and inventory?
I’ve hung out with some of the most renowned astrophysicists and still study the latest discoveries, and there’s truly a lot we know. But there are also built-in barriers that totally block any knowledge of conditions prior to the Big Bang, to give one example. I had the Eastern satori experience, lasted three weeks, no drugs involved, so although quantum theory originators like Erwin Schrodinger provided the science explaining how consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the cosmos, cognizing that fact is far more substantial through direct experience than through scientific logic. So, yes, one can fully experience the underlying reality even if it’s ineffable and thus cannot be communicated.
In other areas, it can be tricky to perceive a truth if language and social custom continually point toward illusion. Only “cosmic consciousness” or the experience of “realization,” which are direct perception states central in Eastern metaphysics, can reveal, for example, how blurry is the distinction between the external and the internal.
But in many areas of inquiry, science can provide the solution. For example, a study of the physiology underlying vision, along with knowing that photons are solely fashioned of magnetic and electric fields, leads to the unexpected revelation that no scene containing brightness or color can be located outside your body. Does even one person in a thousand know that colors are an internal phenomenon, created and perceived solely in the brain? Isaac Newton did. No wonder he undertook vain efforts to wake people up to what was going on, even entitling a booklet, “The Rays Are Not Colored.”
So the truly deepest questions include a mixture of answerable inquiries (e.g. What are Nature’s four forces?), profound but unknowable items (e.g. Could dark energy’s anti-gravity nature someday reverse itself, given that it “switched on” only a few billion years ago?), concepts solely amenable to those who have already experienced them (e.g. How might you convey “blue” to a person born blind?), issues beyond the ken of science (e.g. Does conscious experience extend beyond the body’s death?), ones answerable through statistics (what percentage of planets have life-friendly temperatures?), and those that result in new realities (e.g. Since entangled particles exchange information instantaneously regardless of distance, does that prove the nonexistence of time? Of Einstein’s “local realism”? Does it support an ongoing connectedness between all things?)
Bottom line: Keep creating questions. They are science’s heart and soul.
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