Let’s start off with a big subject. Most of what you know and I know as truth is wrong. A big statement I know, and I don’t refer to the ephemera of everyday experience, but to the big questions. In Western societies, self-defined as ‘first world’, we carry with us a huge arrogance that we are somehow superior, better educated and informed, more advanced and morally more advanced than, not only other parts of the world, but to our ancestors and those that preceded us, even by a decade or two. But many of the fundamentals we take for granted are either incorrect, or nothing more than educated guesses.
To pick a couple of examples which come to mind first, gravity and paracetamol. Very different ends of the spectrum of experience, but good examples and substitutes for the wider arguments I want to propose.
We take gravity for granted, whether it be the law of gravity or the theory of gravity, but our general perceptions of what it is are wrong. I think what will first spring to mind for someone in the UK, for example, is the image of an apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, inspiring him to the conclusion that something is making objects have weight and fall to the ground. I’m not saying this is right, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that that this is a fairly widespread understanding. Now I’m no great physicist, just a layperson, and some of the mathematics is beyond me, but as I have a curious mind, I’ve researched this subject a bit in the past. Aside from the story being apocryphal, and his research starting long before, universal gravity is a theory rather than a fact. It is based on the quite limited set of observable factors and agents (think for a moment about the size of the universe and how much of it we can actually see and measure), and actually needed a new branch of mathematics to be invented for it to even work on paper. Think about that for just a moment. We had to invent maths for it to work. And subsequent research and the invention of quantum mechanics, with delights such as colour force, quarks, strings and waves, don’t comply with concepts like gravity unless you invent yet more theoretical mathematical constructs to batter them into an explainable theory. And even then, there are inexplicable inconsistencies, and another biggie, the theory of relativity also has holes in it (not just black ones) when put alongside observable (and theoretical) quantum interactions, and the wonder of explanations based on particles we assume to exist, bosons and leptons, but have never seen. If your head is spinning, so is mine, and we’re at the very limits of my quite limited understanding (I’d recommend reading books by someone like Michio Kaku if you want a semi-accessible understanding of cutting-edge physics). To return to my original argument, gravity is a theory, not a fact. And it is far from a perfect theory. Physicists around the world hunt the holy grail of a unified field theory, to make sense of all the contradictory things we know, but that too will be a theory. We simply don’t know enough to be definitive. And this is my point. Talk to any serious scientist, and they’ll admit that almost everything we know is just a theory, based on observable phenomena and theoretical maths. And we’ll continue to hold it as true(ish) only until proved different. In the big scheme of things, there is still an immense amount of data and phenomena that we are unable to observe. So, the best science is semi-informed guesswork. The funny thing is that scientists re quite open about this. The rank and file everyday people like us are the ones who think we know more than we do.
My second example, paracetamol, is a proxy for most of medicine. We know, from observable reactions, by now over a large timespan and sample size, that it reduces temperature and lessens pain. But we actually haven’t got the faintest real idea how or why. Theoretical (here we go again with theories) posit potential explanations, but as we are similarly actually quite ignorant of how a lot of the body and mind really work, it is next to impossible to understand how a drug interacts with us. Our use of many drugs, as a standard treatment, are based on observing what they tend to do (most of the time), so prescription is essentially on the same basis that physicians used to suggest leeches, maggots, cupping, and bleeding as cures. And before you scoff, treatments such as sterile maggots eating dead flesh from wounds have been re-introduced in recent times. If you talk to a GP off the record, they will likely admit that many of the ailments they see daily will fix themselves over time, and it is a placebo effect that we think modern medicine has provided a cure. The same way that we view ‘horrific’ medical practices of the past, future humanity may well recoil in terror that we live a life where we still pull out teeth with pliers (with a medical name), amputate limbs as the best way of stopping an infection spreading, blast healthy as well as cancerous tissue with destructive radiation, and inoculate by essentially giving you a weakened form of the disease you are trying to eradicate. I know in the latter case it is usually a sterile and safe substitute of a pathogen, but the principle remains the same.
The truth is that we are blissfully ignorant of how our own bodies work, how they convert food to energy so efficiently, what a ‘mind’ actually is, why certain drugs sometimes work and sometimes don’t. We may as well add ‘luck’ as another medical specialism alongside cardiology, immunology, and histology.
So, in summary, two of the most significant sciences, of fundamental physics and medicine, rely heavily on theory, and are peppered with the absence of actual facts and knowledge. The same viewpoint can be justified for much of what we claim to know as an ‘advanced’ society and civilisation. Unsettling, isn’t it? Like seeing how laws and sausages are made.
Stay safe,
Kit