Why Trying To Understand The Universe is Pointless
Ever since the dawn of time, we have had legendary scientists who have collectively peeled a layer off the mystery of the universe. We have had the likes of Isaac Newton, who unravelled the mystery of gravity, Michael Faraday, who channelled his powers to show us that electricity is possible, and Galileo Galilei, who was subjected to house arrest after telling the masses that the earth isn’t the center of the universe and was condemned by the church.
To the more modern geniuses, such as Einstein, who gave us the Theory of Relativity, Shannon showed us that information could be transferred through channels with his “Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Currently, we are harnessing the power of reinforcement learning & statistics to create machines that are competent enough to perform white-collar work. However, this steady progress in science, philosophy, and technology has given us more questions than answers. The thing about the universe is that when you have laid the foundation for a discovery of an aspect of it, you discover something else that makes you question your foundation. Think about the universe when the understanding of its creation was based on the Bible, and that was what everyone believed until Galileo used his telescope to discover that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, it revolves around the Sun, and then he was condemned for it. It was not until he passed that it was proven right. Isaac Newton laid the foundations of classical mechanics with his three laws of motion — and at that moment we believe every object in the universe follows the laws of motion and then Max Planck showed us that at the subatomic level protons, neutrons and electrons don’t follow those rules & then we thought we understood quantum mechanics completely until Werner Heisenberg gave us the “Uncertainty Principle”.
Science and technology have reached such heights that if our ancestors from the Stone Age could see what we are capable of today, they would believe that what we are doing is nothing short of magic. MIT researchers just released a paper giving us a glimpse of how to program quantum matter. SpaceX is currently creating rockets that land by themselves. Google’s Waymo self-driving cars can take you from point A to point B with no accidents and no inconvenience. We have uncovered the foundational rules of this universe, yet we have more questions than answers. Some of them included “Who created the universe?”, “Where do black holes lead to?”, “Why is the universe so mathematically structured?” “Why do neural networks work?”. It feels like when we uncover a new theory, it raises 100 more questions about the universe. Researchers would try answering these questions and leave them with an exponential number of questions than they originally started with. So the ultimate question is “Why try to understand the universe?” Maybe we never meant to. “Will humanity ever understand the nature of reality?” I really don’t think so, no matter how advanced science or technology gets, we would always have more questions than answers. This is not to say that scientific discovery is a waste of time. It’s more to say that the universe is mysterious for a reason, and think about it — if we discovered all the fundamental truths of the universe, what else would there be to do?
All the rules of this universe weren’t meant to be understood; the creator of this universe knew the joy of scientific discovery would be the foundation of excitement to those who inhabit it. Just take a look at the eyes of the public when they introduced the iPhone, or the excitement when we find a way to shrink memory further — this is what life is all about, so next time you wonder why the universe is elusive and mysterious, whisper to yourself, “maybe it’s meant to be.”
rustian ⚡️
