Probably, the End Is Not Near

The first sentence of a recent Scientific American article “The End of Cosmology?” which was publish in February, deeply caught my attention. It concerns a topic I have been pondering for decades:

One hundred years ago a Scientific American article about the history and large-scale structure of the universe would have been almost completely wrong.

The central question is, Will that continue to be the case, or are we reaching the end of knowledge, at least in cosmology, which concerns the physical properties of the universe? This has been a chief interest of mine. My idea, influenced, it appears, by William James’s ideas on similar matters, has been that the probabilities are against the end of knowing. Everything has kept changing right up to the moment when that SA article was published. Knowledge has kept increasing, sometimes in huge bounds forward or upward or some-ward. The big theories have kept changing in one theoretic revolution after another. Probability suggests that change in fact and theory will continue, since up to this moment fact and theory have kept changing. Further out or up or somewhere out there, there also stands the question of super-nature, super-cosmology -- that is, God or the Gods and his or their dominions. Ideas about that big topic keep changing, too.Should we not expect, on the probabilities, that ideas of nature and super-nature will keep on changing, even that some day people will look back on the ideas that thinkers entertained or adopted in our lifetimes as silly? The probabilities seem strong. Back in 1908 scientists thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy, a lone island in the universe. They thought a void surrounded us. Now we know that this galaxy is one of more than 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe. (400 billion?! That’s a fact so hard to get my own mind around, the idea of 400 billion vastly complex objects, that I personally have to take it on faith [which could be the subject of another excogitation].) In 1908, the article says, scientists agreed that the universe was static and eternal. There was no theory of a big bang. They didn’t understand the origin of elements in the first nanoseconds of that humongous blast (not that I understand that; again, I accept such a theory on faith -- and provisionally at that). That space is expanding and curved (I can’t even understand either of those purportedly interlocked ideas, much as I once tried) and that it is buzzing with radiation (evidence of the bang itself) also were not known. That's hardly a knock on the scientists of old. No one had yet designed the modern technologies that would reveal these facts -- which are truly known as facts to only a very small group of people who can understand and demonstrate them. So, big changes have occurred in the last 100 years in how we conceive (most of us by faith) of this now finite universe. The photo, by the way, is a shot of my daughter Miranda and her cat, who has gone to her great reward. Misty was always watching life from the top of those steps in Miranda and Art's Copper Harbor cabin.

My questions are, Will those conceptions change? Will the facts change or be added to? Will the big, overarching theories change? Scientific American thinks that future thinkers might not produce all that much more empirical knowledge or radically different interpretations of it. One of the reasons, the article says, is that the universe might be wiping out the evidence it has left behind of its origins. The recent work of cosmologists suggests, to the writers and editors of Scientific American, that the end of knowledge could very well at hand. Can it be? I wonder. The probabilities are against it, as I say. But probabilities have failed. Exceptions keep occurring. Sometimes the end of some inquiry comes. Perhaps next, we will also meet God or experience super-nature -- or maybe that event will wait for thousands of years if it comes at all. Or maybe it will take place tomorrow, if I die, if God or Gods exist, and if there is an life to come in which human beings encounter God or Gods. All that keeps a fellow excogitating, no?

Yeah, yeah, I know. The scientists at Scientific American don’t mix considerations of nature and super-nature. So what? I’m doing the excogitating here.