"What do we know about the
universe?" asked astronomer Bob Berman to a crowded room at IdeaFestival
2015 in Louisville, Kentucky. "Why aren't the answers satisfying? Where
do they go wrong?"
There's
a lot of hard and fast data, he says, but it doesn't always give us the
right answers. "It's important to know when science is working," said
Berman, "and when it's not."
Berman offered four reasons that our scientific approach to
understanding the universe doesn't work, and what we can do about it, according to a Yahoo article:
1. Limited data--Most
of the universe is dark energy and the rest is dark matter--and we
don't know what that is, said Berman. "We only know what's in our
vicinity."
2. Limits to our dualistic logic system--There
are two ways we get information, Berman said. Directly and indirectly.
In science, the indirect method can work sometimes. But not for
everything. "Unless you experience love," Berman said, "you won't know
what it is. If you're blind, you won't know the color blue. You need
experience. And when it comes to the universe, we run out of symbols."
The universe is growing larger, he said, "but what does that mean? We
can't picture infinity."
3. Space/time framework--"Space
actually is not real," said Berman. "We all have an image of space and
time, a framework, but when we look, that space and time may have a
questionable reality." Of time, Berman said it's also not real. It's
merely "an ordering system that we animals created. And it changes."
4. Consciousness--"Consciousness
is the greatest unsolved problem in all of science," said Berman. "In
every experiment, we're seeing, thinking, concluding--and it happens in
our consciousness. Experiments go differently if we measure them and how
we measure them. Where we measure makes a difference. It depends on us
as observers." And while we "continue to study the brain and how it
works, this doesn't answer the question of human experience," said
Berman.
Berman believes
that science is not approaching the universe from the right angle. We
continue to study the Big Bang, he said, but it "doesn't compute with
us. In our everyday lives we don't see puppies and lawn furniture
popping out of nothingness. A universe out of nothingness? How could
that be? How could we possibly know what things were like before the
universe was the size of a grapenut?" And even if we pin down the Big
Bang, we still can't comprehend the infiniteness of the universe, he
said. "We are representatives of the universe. We have the universe
inside of us."
"We are representatives of the universe. We have the universe inside of us. We're working on the assumption that studying the parts will give us the whole," Berman said. "That may not be true."
So what's the answer? "If our thought process doesn't work with the
macro-universe," Berman said, "the answers don't make sense. It means
we're asking the wrong questions."
In terms of what we can ever know about the universe, "we're not
really making progress," Berman said. "We're not knowing more and more."
The secret, he said, might lie in recognizing that the thing we are
looking for is obvious rather than hidden; present rather than absent.
