dark matters

At some undefined point in the early 21^st century we were overrun by our own science output. Gone are the days of the generalist, the enlightened noble man, who was interested in and capable of not making a complete fool of himself across a wide range of disciplines. We all know the spectacled geniuses of days gone past who contributed, to our great gain, in fields as diverse as Astronomy, Biology, Arts, Mathematics, Anthropology and the study of really small but largely disgusting living things – Entomology. So small was the knowledge in each discipline that one man could conceivably master several of them. In fact most disciplines only came into being because of the heroic inquisitiveness and disregard for having ones face dunked into successive proverbial academic vats of future organic fertilizer. Happily they plunged in, not only enabling humanity’s unshackling from the dim intellectual climate of the dark ages but also setting us into the general direction of an ever increasing cornucopia of expanding scientific horizons. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Relatively speaking.

Today though, any and all taxi drivers, neighborhood pub proprietors, politicians and professors of economics frequently can be overheard saying “Don’t explain viral transfection to me, I won’t get it anyway”. How often do you come across an article or a news item and it just blows your mind to think about it? So you let it go and file it away in a dim recess of your mind around which cobwebs soon form. Who really cares to understand how their Plasma TV works as long as it delivers HD quality on Super Bowl Sunday? Who really wonders how, if the Universe is only fourteen billion years old, it can possibly be 28 light years across? E = mc² and all that.

The brief reprieve from our general ignorance of the knowledge accumulated by humans is over. It lasted from whenever you want to say the Enlightenment started until right about now. This is not such a long time as to be incomprehensible. Neither does it mean that all humans understood everything there was to understand. It does however mean that

the end of enlightenment

is upon us. We can not perceive the intricacies of string theory. We can not fathom eight dimensions. If you ask us how large the Universe is we might toss out a number. But understanding how we fold space unless we think it in a Homer Simpson kind of way, involving Doughnuts, is as beyond us as flying, or as telling a 15^th century priest that the earth was not the center of the universe.

But now we have a new priest caste. The new priesthood that explains the things to us does not wear some priestly outfit anymore. They have anti-pen-leaking-devices in their shirts where the padre of old might have carried a bible on his heart. They do not explain heaven and possible afterlives to us. They focus on the here and now, and maybe the tomorrow. They do so in no less confusing terms then the old-school priesthoods explained their particular knowledge to us.

Interestingly enough the infidelity to their heavenly lords displayed by the masses over the last couple of hundred years seems to have coincided with the increase in general knowledge of the here and now. People who understand the basic parameters of their existence do not have to rely on semi-mystical explanations thereof.

However, now we are rapidly entering a stage of human development that individuals can not comprehend on a generalist or even a specialist level. If you want to really understand the problems of viral transfection, namely how to insert therapeutic DNA into viral genomes, you will have to spend a couple of decades on under/post graduate, PHD and Post Doc work. At which point, of course, the field will have moved so far ahead of your pithy knowledge that you can either take advantage of the newest transfection drugs to fix your nearly senile brain, start over again, or just plainly say “Don’t explain this to me, I won’t get it anyways.”

Now imagine - this is not too hard, just think of you – an average IQ possessing person, in an average job, maybe even doing some fairly intellectually taxing work. How is this person ever going to really understand what is going on in the gazillion different disciplines that populate our sciences at this point? You are right it will not happen. What will happen instead?

Not understanding the basic parameters of our existence is the same as not knowing, and that is unacceptable to our psyche. We look for alternative explanations. We must know. Therefore we will explain. As opposed to the majority of human history, during recent centuries ever larger numbers of humans knew basic principles of how our planet’s functions and what our existence on it entails. When before we had needed the priestesses to explain our originational sins to us, suddenly we thought that we knew our past and were capable of understanding our futures – soon it was going to be just a matter of time, of processing power, before we finally knew it all. What we did not consider was that even though this knowledge is being assembled and will undoubtedly keep being assembled into the far distant future, the accumulated knowledge would become too diverse, too multifaceted, too disintegrated. Not any one person, and certainly not your average Peter Illetschko could hold it all in their head. For that reason we are once again, as in the dark ages, reaching a state of divorce between knowledge and society. We are consciously distancing ourselves from any claims to understand what the bleep is going on with all this newfangled stuff out there.

Newton was sort of obvious to understand. Even if math boggles your mind and even he was a genius, at the end of the day we could all observe the apple fall from the tree. But how are you going to observe a neutron streaking across a gaseous container after you sucked it out of a Helium-4 Source of Ultra Cold Neutrons? How are you going to measure the universe? How are you going to observe dimensions four, five and six, if all they are is mental constructs in the minds of maybe three mathematicians worldwide who are smart enough to understand the concept?

You are not, and when the pressure of not getting it weighs to heavy on your mind, when you crave those warm & fuzzies, you will crawl back to the first guy who gives you some mildly sensible balderdash of why you are not a monkey.