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One of the most amusing tweets I’ve ever seen, which I remember and giggle about at least once a month, was by everyone’s favourite pompous celebrity scientist and living meme, Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
In March of this year, the astrophysicist Tyson took to Twitter to boldly declare:
“What scientists know about the world is mind-blowing. What the public thinks scientists don’t know about the world is alarming.”
What scientists know about the world is mind-blowing. What the public thinks scientists don’t know about the world is alarming.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 8, 2022
Now, to be sure, science and the scientific method as we know it are truly amazing – far be it from me to knock the crown jewel of Western society. These things are the proud fruits of Christian civilisation, as I covered in a previous piece, and have vastly improved the welfare of mankind. No sane person would say otherwise, and it’s in no way my intent to knock science.
But even with all we have achieved, Tyson has it backwards: the gap between what scientists actually know, and what they think they know, is enormous.
And that gap has been highlighted yet again, after new photos from the James Webb Space Telescope threatened one of modern science’s sacred cows – the Big Bang – sending researchers into full “panic” mode in their own words.
As one iai.tv article outlines, since the telescope began sending back photos…
Why would researchers panic over this? Well, the piece explains:
Bear in mind that I’m no scientist, and don’t claim to be an expert in this field. But in very brief layman’s terms, the problem seems to be as follows:
For decades scientists who subscribe to the Big Bang theory have believed that the universe began 13 to 14 billion years ago, and that the furthest galaxies from us are bigger and have a certain amount of “red shift,” indicating that they’re moving away from us. This in turn seems to indicate that the universe is expanding from a single point, meaning it all began from a massive, central blast – i.e. the Big Bang.
But in reality, these new telescope photos seem to show the precise opposite. The photos seem to indicate that the universe is not actually expanding, which raises the question: where did everything come from?
Notably, the iai.tv piece even includes a quote from Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas, who said that since the findings she has been “laying awake at three in the morning wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”
“Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” Kirkpatrick says, “wondering if everything I’ve ever done is wrong.”
I stand by that statement.@alexwitze https://t.co/UgurvyCJr7
— Allison Kirkpatrick (@akastro.bsky.social) (@AkAstronomy) July 27, 2022
Bear in mind, by the way; I’m in no way slagging these people. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being wrong – especially in a scientific field, and especially in a field as complex as cosmology.
I know that personally I’ve been wrong about much simpler topics. We all make a thousand mistakes a day, even down to tiny things like grammar errors in day to day speech. If it turns out that these people’s fears are realised and we’ve all been mistaken about the Big Bang – which remains to be seen – that doesn’t mean that those who believed in it were somehow stupid or incompetent. The very best of us make mistakes, and scientists are no exception.
But whether the Big Bang is correct or not, what findings like this indicate is just how little humanity actually knows when push comes to shove. If new data can threaten to abruptly overturn even something as fundamental as this, which has been the backbone of our cosmological explanations for decades, is there anything that we are truly certain of?
People like Neil DeGrasse Tyson would have you believe we live in a world where most of the big questions have already been conclusively solved. “Of course, there will always be mysteries,” they say. “But on the really important fundamental stuff, we’ve basically got it all done and dusted.” That’s the implication, and the general attitude projected to the general public.
In fact, that’s what most people today believe. And of course this belief dovetails nicely with an atheistic worldview, where the need for God and miracles has been squeezed out of the picture almost entirely.
“We don’t need your hocus pocus theistic explanation for this or that problem,” they say. “We’ve already explained that.”
But have we, though?
We still have basically no understanding of where life comes from, for example. Of course we have ideas, but nobody has successfully managed to create life in a laboratory from scratch, let alone observe it generating itself. That’s one origin which remains almost completely mystifying, and it’s a pretty important one.
We have very little understanding of even something as comparatively simple as how stars form. As reported in the Scientific American in 2010:
We don’t even really know what gravity is. As seen in a 2019 Washington Post article entitled “Everything you thought you knew about gravity is wrong”:
The exact implications of the famous Double Slit Experiment continue to elude us. The so-called “Axis of Evil” within cosmology still baffles experts. Human sentience, dark matter – hell, we don’t even fully understand something as seemingly simple as human nutrition yet. Remember the food pyramid as a kid? That’s all been thrown out now, as outlined in the 2018 RTÉ article “Here’s why the food pyramid is wrong.”
Here's why the food pyramid is wrong https://t.co/w0r8rhrI7g via @RTEBrainstorm @yanzabet @UL
— RTÉ (@rte) March 10, 2018
If we can’t even say with certainty what an ideal human diet should look like, should we be shocked then that we might have come to wrong conclusions about the origins of the cosmos as we know it?
None of this is to say “We don’t know, therefore God did it” – that would obviously be absurd. But as in a court of law, we have more than a reasonable doubt here. We are still hardly any closer to answering mankind’s eternal questions of who we are and where we come from, and to discount theistic explanations out of hand as if we already have an adequate and convincing answer is just unfounded.
The truth is, all scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson can truly say is “We know a lot more about science than we used to.” That’s probably a safe enough bet – it’s pretty clear that we have more scientific data to work with today than, say, an illiterate Iron Age peasant who thought an eclipse was a dragon trying to eat the sun. We’ve certainly come a long way compared to where we were.
But that doesn’t mean we have all the answers, or even most of them. We still know basically nothing, as these telescope photos have shown. And to say otherwise is to delude ourselves.
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