Deludia

chaos theory

Science has had a nervous breakdown. Those things which we used to be comfortable knowing have turned out to be false, replaced by a number of theories which like their predecessors, are unproven. In fact, we have yet to prove anything; we can only disprove things so far. It not only has the world of physics on its ear, it is pointing out how little we really know in comparison to what our hubris causes us to think we know.

We recently found out that our view of the atom is wrong. Thus we have the Large Hadron Collider out to discern exactly what things are indeed made of. I grew up thinking that the atom was like a tiny solar system with a nucleus and electrons spinning about. There was order.  Then science admitted that we really only knew what 25% of the universe was composed of, and because we’re confused about what the atom is now, that means we’re pretty dense about the 25% we do know because we know we don’t know it.

This is a sorry state of affairs for the very authority on what we are. So far the only real agreement is that we are built of the same “stuff” as the rest of the universe and that we live on a small blue dot in the cosmos.  Aside from that Saganism, we’re pretty much lost.

It is no wonder then, that people are gaining faith in religion. We hope to God someone can figure out what the hell is going on and do something about it. We have learned from the dot-com era and the collapse of real estate and pretty much the economics of the planet that numbers certainly do lie and many people are worse off now for it.

We look at our politicians with ridicule and why shouldn’t we. Given the peccadilloes and wide stance examples of character we have been handed, it’s a wonder we can’t buy hunting licenses for them. We choose by least evil instead of most qualified. Our governments are given over to accepted mediocrity and we tolerate the lackadaisical and glacial wrong way course it inevitably takes.

Why should we have wonder that so much is wrong in so many places when the very knowledge of everything sacred to science is in such jeopardy? Who really cares about the banking system when we might learn that there really is no reason for the atoms, whatever they are, not to fly apart and thus the universe disintegrates before our very eyes?

Certainly, not me.