So this is about Ptolemy, Belief
Systems and other Dark Matters.
Now, we're all here
or watching online
because we have an interest in the
exploration and an explanation of the cosmos.
Now when we think about the
investigation of the cosmos
we often focus on the capabilities
and limitations of the instruments
and the observational
tools that we use.
We lose track of the limitations
that are imposed on us by
possibly the greatest instrument, the most critical
instrument involved in this exploratory process
and that is of course
the human mind itself.
Now, unlike the instruments of
our invention, the human mind
really hasn't changed very much, if at all, since
we took our first steps on this great journey.
I often talk about how we have not
really changed very much from
our previous selves
so many thousands of years
ago when we huddled together,
trying to figure out what populated
the darkness beyond the campfire.
And so we lose track of how the
greatest challenge ahead of us
is not really the precision of our
mechanical or electronic instruments,
It's the cumulative psychological
and sociological and biological and
evolutionary hindrances
in our own mind.
Now, I plan to talk about this
for the next little while,
but first I thought it would be
instructive to open with a story.
And this is the story of the
clever king and the sage.
Now once upon a time
there was a clever king.
In fact he was so clever
that it was widely held
that he was the most clever
person in all the land.
More clever than anyone
had ever been before
and probably more clever
than anybody would ever be.
And one day the clever King decided that
he would devote all of his cleverness
and all his kingly resources to
enriching the lives of his subjects by
discovering the secrets of the cosmos, the Sun,
the stars, the Earth and even life itself.
And so he collected all of the
clever people in his land
to help them in this great work.
And for many years the King toiled
with his hundreds of clever people
in constructing the most amazing,
sophisticated, complicated
mechanism ever built.
They poured all of their
collective knowledge into it,
all of their cleverness. Nothing
was missed, no mistakes were made.
And it was wrong.
The magnificent
machine, so complex,
did not explain the cosmos, the Sun
the Earth, the stars and life itself.
It always gave something different
than what the king could see.
Something was wrong.
So, he was so confident,
he knew, he was certain
in fact, that something
little was missing.
They had poured so much
of their knowledge,
so much of their cleverness into this machine.
It had to be something incremental.
So in frustration he looked
for other clever people
who could come and help him
find his missing pieces.
And finally he heard of
a sage, and old wise man
who had wandered through
all of the kingdoms
and was said to be as
wise as time itself.
So he summoned the sage to come before
him and look upon his great work.
And so the King explained,
piece-by-piece,
this incredibly complicated,
beautiful machine.
He's showing him how all of the cleverness
all of the knowledge had gone into it.
And the old wise man nodded and
smiled and he blinked in wonder.
Then said, my king I can tell that indeed
you are the most clever person in the land,
more clever than
anyone who's come before,
probably more clever than
anybody will ever be..
But, he said, I can
immediately see
what it is, where the missing pieces are
that will complete your great work.
The king was
overjoyed, he was amazed.
This is fantastic, he knew it done the
right thing bringing in that sage, right?
So he said; this is great, can you please
tell me what the missing pieces are
so that I complete
this great work?
And then wise man said;
the pieces that are missing are all the things
that you don't know that you don't know.
Well, the king was dumbfounded,
he sputtered in frustration,
so how am I going to complete this great
mechanism if I don't even know what I don't know?
And the old sage nodded and smiled because now he
knew the king was asking the right questions.
And he said; my king when I first met you I knew
you were the most clever person in all the land
but now you're just a
little bit wiser.
Well I can't say the
king took that very well
but the moral of the story
is that the clever man
has complete confidence in the
cleverness of his inventions
and that complete knowledge
is just a few pieces away,
with just a little few more
pieces to complete the picture.
The wise man accepts
and acknowledges that
we can never really know
what we don't know
which means we can never be certain
about anything we think we know
and that, the pursuit of absolute
certainty is probably a foolish goal anyway.
Now there are a couple things
i like about the story.
One of them is this metaphor of this
machine for conceptual frameworks.
After all the system of differential equations
is really just a mathematical machine.
You crank away at it, sort of algorithmically, and
answers and simulations come out the other side.
And if it agrees, relatively well,
with some subset of what we observe
we get quite a bit of certainty
[that] in its general use.
And this ingrains some belief that
it can be used in all conditions.
Well, modeling
mimics understanding.
Now over the course
of our history
we've constructed various complicated
 conceptual frameworks
to try to understand the
workings of the cosmos.
Now, one of these very complicated
conceptual frameworks
can actually trace its lineage back
to ancient Greece and Aristotle
but it was actually perfected
by Claudius Ptolemy.
This is of course the geocentric
model of the universe.
This notion that the Sun and the
planets revolved around the Earth.
Now, Claudius Ptolemy was an observational
astronomer and mathematician
we actually don't know
very much about his life
except that he lived and worked
in Alexandria about 150 AD.
Now however, most of his
work actually survives
and foremost amongst
this is the Almagest
which is a treatise in 13 volumes that
describe the motion of the Sun and the planets.
And indeed the universe was
conceived as a great mechanism.
Nested planetary spheres comprised
of a perfect crystalline substance
called quintessence or ether.
And the planets riding on
the crystalline spheres.
Now quintessence has a natural
perfect circular motion
and also it can never be
experienced here on earth
where we could only experience the normal
elements of earth, air, fire and water.
And now we have this
notion arising
of some disconnection between the
physical nature of the heavens
and what can be experienced here. We actually
see this recurring in modern cosmology.
We'll talk more about that later.
Now one of the things that I like about this
model, one of the things I find interesting
is this creation of new physical
entities and mechanisms
to fill in our gaps
in understanding.
What we don't know, we populate
with new physical entities
and as our imaginings are modified and
adapted to fit with what we observe
then these imaginings are transmuted
into an illusion of understanding.
Now, probably Ptolemy's great
innovation was the use of the equant
and the use of the
epicycle and deferent.
Now through multiple
spheres per planet
and sophisticated use of
epicycles and deferents,
he was able to construct a
very complicated system
to predict the motion of
the Sun and the planets.
And here we see in this animation that
through this use of epicycles and deferents
he could model that back-and-forth
wandering of the planets.
And actually the Ptolemaic model
was relatively satisfactory
and from a mathematical
perspective
was probably one of the most outstanding
achievements of the human mind.
In fact it's very difficult to identify
another scientific system of thought
that was so successful in
predicting for so long.
For over 1400 years it dominated
as our view of the cosmos.
At least until the
advent of Copernicus.
Now, Nicholas Copernicus was originally
educated in art and mathematics
but when he became canon of
the Frombork cathedral
he traveled to Italy, ostensibly
to study religious law.
But what he really did was he
dived headfirst into astronomy
and he made full use of the books
that were available at the time
due to the advent, the recent
advent of the printing press.
Now we all know that Copernicus
made that great leap
and placing the Sun at
the center of the cosmos
and he was largely motivated by a
sense of simplicity and elegance,
the theme of this conference.
But he was also, he also believed very strongly
in Plato's notion of perfect circular motion.
He abhorred Ptolemy's equant
but because he was limited
to circular motion
he needed to use the
epicycle and the deferent
to make his model match
what was observed.
Now to a certain extent it was more simple
and elegant than the Ptolemaic model
but it's arguable whether it
was really that much simpler
and in fact in real practice it didn't
really provide that much better prediction,
if at all, than the
Ptolemaic model.
There's also something on
the heretical side as well
and Copernicus took great
pains during his life
not to actually
broadcast these notions
and is only, was only really published
very shortly before his death in 1543.
And he was right because
in the oncoming years
the church condemned the work and the book was
added to the list of banned books in 1616.
And so the geocentric
model persisted,
even in the face of fairly
convincing contradictory evidence
that was coming
forth from Galileo.
Now Galileo was working
with the telescope
which was just invented in 1609 making
some really critical observations.
Observations like moons around Jupiter
and craters on the moon and sunspots,
but his most critical observation of all
was probably that of the phases of Venus.
The phases of Venus, these observations
were completely inconsistent
with the geocentric
notion of the universe.
If the geocentric model was
a scientific hypothesis
it would have been
disproven out of hand.
And it's a wonderful example
of how humans can ignore
evidence that contradicts a
strongly held belief system.
Well, it is fair to say that life
became uncomfortable for Galileo;
inquisitions tend to do that,
so he eventually recanted, was exiled
and the geocentric model persisted.
In the meantime Kepler was working away and
did away with this notion of circular motion
and developed a new empirical set of planetary
laws of motion based on the ellipse.
He sort of set the stage for
true revolution in human thought.
But it was the groundbreaking
work, actually, of Isaac Newton
that really did away with geocentrism
as our dominant view of the cosmos.
Now, Newton began his groundbreaking
and amazingly broad range of work
when the Scientific Revolution of
the 17th century was in full swing.
His new notions of gravity
provided an exciting new
explanatory framework for
the motion of the planets.
He established a unified earthly
and heavenly system of mechanics.
He was able to independently derive,
mathematically derive, from first principles,
Kepler's empirical laws
of planetary motion.
Now the power of Newton's system
lay in its universality.
It tied together the physical phenomena
both earthly and heavenly into one system.
There was no longer this separation between
the physical nature of the heavens
and what was on earth.
And it's interesting that
this separation, this,
this connection between what happens in
the heavens and what happens on earth
has only been recently
severed again.
But more on that later.
Now the way to Newton's power to this
universality was through mathematics
and the title of his book The Mathematical
Principles Of Natural Philosophy
sort of speaks for itself.
It's embodied and inspired this notion
that the universe could be reduced
and accurately modeled through
mathematical formulation.
But Newton himself admitted
that and if I can paraphrase,
"he had found the laws
but not the cause".
He even though had
not really describe
the underlying physical principles
as the cause behind gravity,
he had established that this
new system of the world
was uniquely grounded
in gravitational laws,
and it's been immensely successful.
It's Newtonian mechanics
that launched rockets and satellites
into orbit and put men on the Moon
and our lack of understanding of what
underlies the gravitational laws
has in no way kept us from taking full
advantage of its mathematical description.
So again we've been lulled
into a sense of understanding.
Now with the advent
of field theory
inspired by the work of,
Far.., I mean Michael Faraday,
we did away with this mechanical
notion of the universe
and replaced it with more abstract
notions of field of influence.
Ultimately Clerk Maxwell
mathematically codified
Faraday's empirically derived
laws of electromagnetism.
Einstein applied field theory to a fairly
major refurbishment of the gravitational laws
in the general
theory of relativity.
And it's with the general
theory of relativity
that we turned our faces
to the natural world
we embraced a mythical, mathematical
universe of space-time fabric
and the smooth dance of
gravitational fields.
And where was electricity and
magnetism in all of this?
Well it was sort of banished
from the cosmological stage
with a vague promise that it
might be unified later on.
And so the earthly sphere became one of
sparks and magnetism and vacuum tubes
and Edison and Tesla and the electric
and the electronic ages, swept over us.
But in cosmology the mathematical
perfection of gravity held sway.
The heavenly sphere was one of pristine
space-time fabric and singularities
and infinitely perfect physical entities
that could not be experienced here on earth.
Sounds familiar.
Now it's ironic that it said that Einstein
kept a portrait of Michael Faraday in his study.
It's ironic because Einstein's great
achievement effectively removed
electricity and magnetism from
our exploration of the cosmos.
And while we waited for the
square peg of electromagnetism
to be fit into the round
hole of Einstein's theories
over the next
hundred or so years,
there was a new complex, sophisticated
mechanism developed and constructed
to explain the
workings of the cosmos
and this is of course the
lambda cold dark matter model.
It's presently known as the
standard model of cosmology.
So, let's have a look at the
lambda cold dark matter model
to orient ourselves a little bit.
Well, if you look it up in Wikipedia, it's
a parameterization of Big Bang cosmology
and cosmological constant lambda
that's associated with dark energy.
Dark energy and dark
matter between the two
comprise something like 96% of the matter
and energy content of the universe.
That other 4% that thin slice of the
cosmological pie chart, as I like to say,
is what we can observe and
actually directly experience.
So here we are again in
a cosmological model
where most of its material content
is outside of our experience.
It cannot be experienced
here on earth.
And I feel like we've taken, certain,
to a certain extent a step backwards
in fact dark energy is even sometimes
referred to as quintessence.
You might remember quintessence of the
crystalline spheres in the Ptolemaic model.
And I'm amazed not so much
by how humans repeat history,
but the level of
detail that they do so.
It's not just a repeat of the same sort of
philosophical concept of the separation
between the physical
nature of Heaven and Earth.
Actually reusing specific words again
to fill in gaps in our understanding.
Now it took over 1,500 years and the
full force of the age of enlightenment
to shatter those
crystalline spheres.
But here we are again.
From the age of enlightenment to what
I can only term the age of “endarkenment”.
Dark energy, dark
matter, black holes..
OK, well, let's focus
in on one of them.
Let's look at dark.
matter. Why dark matter?
Dark matter, the need
for dark matter
arose in the late sixties and the early
seventies from the work of Vera Rubin,
who plotted gravitational, I mean,
rotational curves like this.
Curve A is the curve that we expected to see
and curve B is what was actually observed.
It implied that most of the mass,
there was more mass density in the
galaxy then we can actually observe.
And Vera Rubin reckoned that there
is something like about 6 times
the dark mass in the galaxy
than we can actually see.
And very shortly after, it
became quite common knowledge
and became commonly accepted that Dark
Matter constituted most of the galaxies' mass.
Now, it's interesting because this whole
thing is based on a fundamental assumption
that gravity is the
only force at work.
The equation, the orbital velocity
equation only uses gravitation
as one of its parameters.
So what if though, what if we
don't know what we don't know
what if there's something missing
in that mathematical modeling?
What if electricity and magnetism
actually could play a role?
What if this sort of line of reasoning was
applied in a different field of science?
Now I come from a biological
background, as you heard
and I remember in ecology class learning
about the Lotka-Volterra equation.
The Lotka-Volterra equation is a
system of differential equations
used to model the population dynamics
of predator-prey pairs in ecosystems.
It was famously used to model
the population dynamics
of lynx in arctic air
in northern Canada.
Now what if Lotka found, when
he went out and measured,
[think] actual population
dynamics of lynx and hare that
it didn't really agree
with what his model showed.
What if he had absolute certainty that
his mathematical model was complete.
Then what if he then
{somemore what-if] questions,
what if we then proposed that there
was a hypothetical creature
in the ecosystem that we can't see and
left no impact on the environment,
in fact its presence
could only be detected
through its influence on the population
dynamics of the lynx and the hare.
And what if he did a lot
of super computer modeling
to show that other predator-prey
pairings in the world
could actually be modeled and predicted
if he just adjusted the placement
and the relative density of this
hypothetical creature that we can't see.
Well it didn't actually play out that way
because biologists have a very healthy
respect for the incompleteness
of their mathematical models.
But you see the
logical flaw here.
Well, what if a similar
sort of logical flaw
has taken us to incorrect
conclusions about dark matter?
Well then we would expect
to see discrepancies
between what the cold dark matter
model predicts and what we observe.
That happens to be the case.
There are actually
a list of issues.
There's the Dwarf
Galaxy Problem.
There is the Cuspy Halo
or (Core/Cusp) problem.
There's this issue with the Ratio of regular
Matter to Dark Matter in some cases.
There's a Dwarf Galaxy Pancake Problem
which is actually fairly serious
and we have a problem with, we
don't have any Local Dark Matter.
So we'll go through
each of these in turn.
Now, the dwarf galaxy problem is also
referred to as the missing satellite problem.
Now this stems from computer simulations
in the cold dark matter model
which predicts orders of magnitude
more satellite dwarf galaxies
than are actually observed.
So, for example, there are about 11 satellite
dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way
but computer simulations, in one case
for example, predicts more than 500
so we're orders of magnitude away
from what we actually observe.
And then we have the
cuspy halo problem
and this refers to, again, computer
simulations that predict
the density distribution
of dark matter in a galaxy.
The mathematical computer
simulations indicate that it's cuspy.
By cuspy I mean, the
dark matter distribution
increases sharply to a peak
at the center of the galaxy.
Well when the usual mathematical derivations
are done based on gravitational dynamics,
the inferred dark matter distribution in
galaxies is seen to be quite smooth. Smooth,
maybe there's a bit of a core and
the core and the core/cusp problem
but it's actually a smooth
profile, there are no cusps,
there's no cuspy dark halos.
This is also known as the
small-scale cosmology crisis.
Then there's the problem with the ratio
of regular matter to dark matter.
Recent studies of a
galaxy sized cloud of gas,
it's actually plasma,
Virgo HI21, this is actually
the bullet cluster,
but in Virgo HI21, that the
derived amount of dark matter
is about a hundred times the amount
of matter that we can observe
and that's 10 times higher
than it really should be.
So this is a real disconnect between what
the model predicts and what we observe.
And now we have this
pancake problem.
This is observations
in January of 2013,
observers from Canada and
France at the Keck Observatory
were amazed to find
that satellite galaxies
were moving in unison
around the Andromeda galaxy
and they were in sort of
a disk-like structure.
A similar disk-like structure
was found around the Milky Way.
It's indicated that it's not unique
to the Andromeda galaxy
and we'll probably find
more of them if we go looking.
Now it's important to note that in the
decades of cold dark matter modeling,
satellite galaxies are always predicted to be
oriented randomly around the larger galaxy.
So this is clearly inconsistent with the
predictions of the cold dark matter model
and actually it puts me
in mind a little bit
of the observations of the
phases of Venus by Galileo.
These observations were
clearly inconsistent
with the predictions of
the geocentric model,
and in a very similar way the
observation of this disk like-structure
of satellite galaxies is completely
inconsistent with the cold dark matter model,
and yet the model persists.
And finally we have the problem
with no local dark matter.
Now this story, actually the
story is a bit of a tale,
starts in 2012 with the report
from a group of observers
at the ESO's La Silla observatory
headed by Christian Moni-Bidin.
They mapped over 400 stars up to
13,000 light-years away from the Sun
and used this data to calculate the
mass of matter in that volume of space.
It was four times the volume of space
than had ever been considered before.
The intent was to compare the
amount of observable matter
versus the amount of matter that is derived
gravitationally, through mathematical means,
and compare the two and the discrepancy
like we saw with Vera Rubin,
discrepancy would indicate the
amount of dark matter that's present.
And what they found when
they compared the two
was that there is no need to
invoke a dark-matter component.
So there was no dark matter.
Well this prompted an article
in The New Scientist
where they declared a
dark-matter conundrum.
Well about a month or so later
there's a paper from another group
headed by Bovy and Tremaine
who took exception to one of the
assumptions in this previous paper
and it was an assumption that the rotational
velocity of the stars in that region of space
were constant as you moved away
from the center of the galaxy.
So they corrected for that
and they also introduced
their own assumptions
about the mass distribution
in that volume of space
and what they found
was actually, now,
there was the amount of
dark matter [the] model predicted,
in fact just a little bit more
just to be on the safe side.
So, that elicited another
article in The New Scientist
where they claim that
the crisis was averted.
And there's a really interesting
quote in this New Scientist paper
that I like where they say,
"the true believers of dark
matter were never really worried".
So I find it interesting the
use of the term "true believers"
and so the story ended
for the New Scientist.
But, if you follow that kind of
literature and you track these issues,
in 2014 Modi Boudin et al.
published another paper
finding that the mass distribution
assumptions of Bovian Tremain
actually were completely
inconsistent with observational data;
and that, when they corrected
for a mass distribution
that was consistent
with observational data,
and corrected for their own assumption
about the rotational velocity of the stars,
that in fact, again they found there was
a negligible amount of dark matter.
There really was no
need for dark matter
but.. So, crisis averted?
No, not really!
But there were no headlines,
there's no follow-on story
in The New Scientist,
and the point of view of the New Scientist "Crisis
averted" -- the world was safe for dark matter.
But why "crisis"?
I'm interested in the use
of this word 'crisis'.
I happen to live in the UK and
next week we're going to vote
to see if we stay
in the EU or not.
Now proponents of both sides
present various crises
that will ensue if we go one way
or the other. If we leave the EU
the national health system will suffer,
the real estate in London will go down
and foreign exchange and
the UK pound will suffer.
Or, if we stick with the UK we'll lose\sovereignty, we'll lose control of our destiny.
So crisis on both sides.
But why crisis with dark
matter? I don't understand that.
If we find that there's no
such thing as dark matter
it's not going to change the
real estate prices in London,
so I don't understand
what the crisis is.
Well it's a crisis in belief
and when you have belief systems
in science you've got trouble
and belief systems come
wrapped in certainty.
When you have certainty, our
rational mind ceases to play
a primary function in
our cognitive processes.
But really, I can't say it
better than Mark Twain;
"it's not what you don't
know that gets into trouble
it's what you know for
sure that just ain't so".
And so we have a
problem with certainty.
And when it comes to certainty I
really can't recommend a better book
than this book by
Robert A. Burton,
On Being Certain or Believing
You're Right Even When You're Not.
And in it he covers a range of material
about certainty and our sense of knowing.
For instance a very interesting
example, called the Challenger study.
This pertains to how we remember things
around dramatic events in our lives
and when the Space
Shuttle exploded
dr. Ove Kneisser, psychologist and
the father of cognitive psychology
had 106 of his students
record in their journals
what they were doing at the time,
what was happening, how they felt.
All of the details they can remember
when the event actually happened.
And then he interviewed them
two and a half years later.
Now as you might expect, 25% of them got
a lot of the details completely wrong.
And at least half had a
few details incorrect
but what was really interesting
was the reaction of some of the
students to their handwritten notes.
In the words of one of the
students, "that's my handwriting
but that's not what happened!"
So the students had complete certainty
over their sense of knowing
even in the face of very
convincing evidence,
their own handwritten notes.
Now Burton uses another
example along these lines
and it has to do with Cotard
syndrome, this is dr. Cotard
who described a syndrome in patients
who develop a delusion of negation.
Negation of their own existence, negation
of limbs, that their limbs are putrefying
and what's really interesting
about the syndrome
is the unshakable belief in these
patients that they're dead.
Now Burton describes
one case, Miss B
who came into the hospital with a very
 severe case of viral encephalitis.
While she was there she
began to complain about
things not feeling real
and that she was dead.
The hospital staff had her
hold her hand to her heart
so that she can feel her beating heart and she
admitted she could feel her beating heart.
But she argued that the
beating of her heart
was in no way evidence that she was
alive when she was clearly dead.
She was absolutely certain she was
dead, all evidence to the contrary.
So Burton uses Cotard's syndrome, the
Challenger study, placebo effects
to show that when there's a
conflict between rational evidence
and what we see with our own
eyes, vs our feeling of knowing,
our sense of rightness and correctness,
that feeling wins out almost every time
and he argues that there's some physiological
basis to this feeling of knowing
that is so powerful that it makes a rational
thought seem, feel, wrong or irrelevant.
And he felt that, he argued, that it
had to do with the limbic system.
Now the limbic system is associated
with our primitive brain,
it's the seat of strong emotions,
fear and hatred and anger.
In fact the amygdala controls
all the strong emotions.
The hippocampus plays a role in converting
short-term memories into long-term memories.
Burton describes a study,
a cortical mapping study,
where they stimulated regions
of the temporal lobe
associated with parts
of our lymbic system.
And he described patient
responses where,
if that particular part of the temporal lobe
associated with limbic system was stimulated,
they had a feeling of certainty.
They had a feeling of certainty,
a sense of knowing, a deja
vu, a sense of familiar..
a sense of familiarity
in a strange environment.
So, he argued that if it is
possible to stimulate the brain
and produce these primary
feelings and knowing
it's very much other, like other
primary things like anger.
And he argued that our feeling of
certainty is actually closely associated
with these primary
feelings in our lymbic system.
And it's not surprising that certainty
is connected with the limbic system.
Recent neurological research has shown
that social threats and rewards
evoke the same neuro-chemical responses
as actual physical threats and rewards.
A threat to our certainty
evokes the same neurotransmitter
response as an actual physical threat.
So it would seem to be
connected to the limbic system.
So we have a number of issues,
things that we are up against.
Well, we don't know
what we don't know
but we always seem
to forget that.
We have certainty in
what we think we know
and it limits the
acquisition of new knowledge.
There's this myth of the
rational objective mind
where we're really under the control
of our limbic system
and what we really need to do is
encourage the pursuit of uncertainty,
but that's completely counter to
our physiology in our evolution.
So here we are,
all of our beliefs and our
biases and our blind spots
trying to make shapes
of the darkness
and we construct stories that match
the shapes that we think we see.
So should we stop trying to discover what's
out there, looking back in the darkness?
I don't think we could even if we tried
We're compelled to ask these basic questions
like the clever king about the cosmos, the
Sun, the Earth, the stars and life itself.
But we're also compelled
to construct stories,
to help fill the gaps
in our understanding,
to give us satisfying answers
however wrong they are,
to answer those basic questions.
So like any device that we use
to investigate the cosmos,
we need to understand the
limitations of our own mind.
When the device, when the instrument
is giving us noisy or valid data,
are we believing what we see
or seeing what we believe?
I would argue that dark matter is
more of a manifestation of gray matter,
so we end up seeing
it everywhere we look.
It's been shown that
our rational mind
cannot work independently
of our threat-reward responses.
We're under the sway of the
limbic system like some
great psychological
schoolyard bully in our mind.
Our ability to objectively observe is
severely limited by our biases and beliefs,
we know that!
And yet we have this myth of
the rational objective mind.
We think we got it all figured out, just
a few more pieces, we're almost there.
But how can we, when we don't
know what we don't know.
Have we learned nothing
from the clever King.
Which reminds me, I haven't actually finished
the story of the clever king and the sage.
The sage learned that it was unwise to
provoke a frustrated and angry king
and he spent a few years learning even more
wisdom in the King's dungeons, unfortunately.
The King learned
wisdom, over many years,
because he discovered that he could
never complete his great machine,
and that it was probably based
on faulty principles anyway.
And so he learned that the
sage was actually right.
So he released the sage who
was very ancient by that time
and they together, in the remaining years,
taught the clever people in the kingdom
about the foolishness of certainty
and the rich rewards of uncertainty.
Now having said all that I have a
few qualified certainties of my own.
I'm only human after all
and I'm encumbered with
my own belief systems.
So I believe that there is no
matter and energy in the universe
that cannot be experienced
and experimented with here.
We do not live in an island of normal
matter in otherwise exotic universe.
The darkness beyond the campfire
is not inherently different,
is just as yet unlit.
That the universe is a manifestation of
gravity and electricity and magnetism
in a glorious interplay that we're only
just now on the verge of glimpsing.
And that in this quest we
need to embrace uncertainty
and allow ourselves only a
qualified provisional understanding
of what we think we see in the
darkness beyond the campfire.
Thank you!
