Are we still explorers?

I saw Interstellar last night. Like many movies that deal with topics I’m interested in, I was simultaneously engaged by the subject matter but disappointed by the way in which it was handled. I would have been significantly happier had there not been any voyage to the inside of a black hole. That, and essentially everything that followed, took my entire movie experience from :D to :-|.

But there were seeds in that experience that have been bouncing around in my head ever since, and I’m grateful for that.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about. I think that our progress in science and technology over the preceding 100+- years has led our collective consciousness to a certain ego-centrism. I think that we have moved from our toddler phase where we don’t know anything at all (and we wouldn’t even know what questions to ask) to our teenager phase where we think we know, if not everything, than a considerable percentage of everything.

That’s a broad statement, and while writing it I was challenging myself to be more specific, so let me do that. I don’t mean to say that we think we know everything about, say, human aging and how to eliminate age-related death. We clearly don’t, and I think that we all know that. What I suppose I mean to say is that we feel like we understand the fundamental forces that shape our universe and how they act.

For the past several hundred years, we have consistently made massive fundamental discoveries about the universe. Gravity. Electromagnetism. Nuclear. Relativity. Quantum mechanics. These discoveries took us from a place where we literally couldn’t explain the world around us to a place where we could. The universe became comprehensible, and deterministic.

I think the public perceives science, now, to be a matter of application. How can we apply our knowledge of how the universe works to solving problems related to health, communications, standard-of-living, etc. But, I don’t think most people ever imagine that maybe there are more fundamental discoveries to be made.

I think our general mindset is one of mastery: we “get it”. Even if we don’t know exactly know a particular answer today, all we need to do to get from here to there is allocate the right amount of grant funding and some researchers will certainly figure it out.

I remember when I was young my dad was reading a book about Einstein’s search for the GUT--the grand unified theory--that would, essentially, create a framework for understanding all of the four fundamental forces. He was never able to get there because gravity never really fit in, but the picture that my dad got from reading the book (and relayed to a ten-year-old me) was that if Einstein had only figured out that last piece of the puzzle, then we’d basically understand everything, all of it. We’re so close to understanding everything.

“We are explorers.” Matthew McConaughey’s line stuck with me. But there is nothing innately exploration-seeking in humans. It is a trait that we have cultivated over the past 400 years because it has been a successful strategy. The Enlightenment made scientific inquiry incredibly productive. The discovery of the new world made physical exploration a worthwhile pursuit.

I think that the explorer mindset also leads humanity to be its best self. It gives us a sense of hope, a sense of shared purpose, and something to productively engage our minds (and our lives) in. And ultimately, it’s the only real chance we have of avoiding extinction.

But I don’t think we should take that mindset as a given. If we really believe we understand everything, we’ll stop searching.

Have we really discovered everything we can about how the universe works? I don’t think physicists believe that we have. I think that this misconception is one that is only harbored by lay people. We just don’t come face-to-face with questions that we don’t know the answer to any more, which makes us feel very sure of ourselves. To bump up against the questions that really boggle our understanding of reality, we need to be looking at a black hole, or a subatomic particle, or...

This isn’t a knock on normal people (like me). I’m not impugning our lack of imagination. I just think we need to find ways to stay engaged with the bleeding edge of physics to recapture our sense of awe, of humbleness, and of excitement about the future (and desire to get there). The world around us doesn’t just hit us on the head with these questions today in the same way it did in Newton’s.