Black Hole Muse
Edges Of Our Knowledge
Reading through Stephen Hawking’s epic book ‘A brief history of time’, I was fascinated by the intricate concepts that describe the Universe we live in. I was also fascinated by the idea that there are limits to our knowledge. Which is something I had not spent too much time thinking about before. Think about how far we have come from the days of Galileo, Newton and even Einstein.
We have built up a generational knowledge base that we can now use to predict things in the future. Like your local weather, which now includes alerts for life threatening events. Or where planetary bodies like Pluto & Mercury are going to be based on orbital mechanics. Or when our own star will turn into a red giant. This vast knowledge base has allowed us to lead lives surrounded with technological innovations and with some certainty about the future. But there have always been limits to our knowledge.
“As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.” — NDT
Even if our theory makes concrete predictions, until those predictions can be verified by repeated experiments, we can’t accept them to be conclusive. As was the case with successfully detecting long hypothesized Gravitational Waves. Janna Levin’s book “Black Hole Blues and Other Songs From Outer Space” covers the behind the scenes…
