What We Know and What We Don’t

It is a commonplace of modern culture to assume that we are rapidly closing in on a TOE – A Theory of Everything. Given that knowledge is growing exponentially, can omniscience be far off? 

Imagine a sphere comprising every ‘bit’ of information that constitutes the Cosmos. Inside that sphere imagine 3 additional spheres of varying volumes, each concentric with the outermost (Cosmic) sphere.

Within the Cosmic Sphere lies the Sphere of the Ontologically Knowability; it contains everything any conscious being within any cosmos could ever know about that cosmos. Whatever is between these two spheres is forever unknowable due to ontological constraints. 

Within the Sphere of the Ontologically Knowable lies the Sphere of the Epistemologically Knowable. Between these two spheres lies data about the cosmos that is theoretically, but not actually, knowable given the present state of theory and technology.

Finally, there is a sphere of things we could know now but just don’t. We haven’t got there yet; these are our frontiers. Of course, all of this ‘unknowing’ wraps around a Nucleus which consists of everything we think we do know, right now, about our Cosmos. Here’s the schematic:

Nucleus of what we think we Know Now (Nucleus).

Sphere of the Epistemologically Knowable (SEK).

Sphere of the Ontologically Knowable (SOK).

Sphere of the Cosmos (Cosmos).

While the absolute size of these spheres is of interest, the relative size is more instructive. The music of these spheres is anything but a monotone. Start with Nucleus, what we think we know; obviously, it’s expanding and not at a steady rate. It appears to be accelerating; if so, is the rate of acceleration smooth?

SEK is also expanding. Every day, new advances in theoretical physics and experimental techniques push out the reach of human intelligence. It seems like every day new niches and entire levels of reality become accessible to our investigations.

We can only know what we can know. We can’t know what we can’t know but we can know that we don’t know it. SOK is presumably fixed. And Cosmos? That’s beyond my pay grade. What we do know is that both the Nucleus and SEK are expanding…but at variable, and varying, rates.

For example, until fairly recently, Cosmos was thought to be no more than 14,000 years old; now we know it’s 14,000,000,000. We were only off by 6 orders of magnitude. Likewise, its size was thought to be about 1/10th the size of what we now know to be our Solar System. We equated Cosmos and SOK with SEK. 

Clearly, our Nucleus and our SEK are expanding rapidly, and at an accelerating rate.  Surely something approaching omniscience is right around the corner! But commonplace wisdom is not always correct; correction: commonplace wisdom is usually not correct. And this is case in point!

Knowledge is not a static commodity. My six year old grandchild once asked his mother, “Tell me everything you know!” Knowledge is not like that. There is no end to what can be known, although there are certain limitations permanently imposed by SOK and temporarily by SEK.

When we thought we knew that the cosmos could fit inside what is now known to be Jupiter’s orbit, we weren’t wrong. It was as much as could be known at the time given the epistemological constraints in play. We knew what we knew but we didn’t know what we didn’t know; we were entitled to feel cocky.

With the advent of the telescope, Palomar, the Hubble, and the Webb, it’s now possible to know more, a lot more; and we do know more, much more! But we have our own epistemological barriers to reckon with. For example, we can only go as far as the speed of light can carry us!

Every day, we watch from a window table at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams) as whole galaxies slip across the event horizon. We are watching Cosmos ‘set’ as it expands. Someday, there will only be Milky Way; someday only Solar System; someday…

Even now, we are walled off from the Multiverse and from Penrose’s Cosmic Cycles (CCC: Big Bounce). Not only does the extent of our current cosmos exceed our ken but we believe that our cosmos may be one of many, perhaps infinitely many, ‘alternatives’. 

As much as we do know, what we don’t know vastly exceeds it. Even the unknown is nuanced. We need to identify three ‘flavors’ of ignorance: (1) I could know it but I don’t; (2) it’s knowable but I can’t (epistemological constraints); (3) as far as we know, it’s not knowable (ontological constraints). 

So how much do we know?  That depends on which flavor of ignorance you choose for your baseline. Compared to what we can know but don’t (flavor #1), I’ll stipulate that we’re in pretty good shape. Let’s face it, we know a lot. But do we know more, proportionate to what we could know, than Parmenides knew 2500 years ago? Or Copernicus 500 years ago?

I believe that Parmenides and Copernicus were aware, broadly speaking, of epistemological and ontological constraints; however, their sense of ‘what lay beyond’ is much vaguer than our own. And within the realm of the fully knowable, I conjecture that they understood about the same percentage as we do today.

I am proposing the following: knowledge is growing at an accelerating rate…but so is the Sphere of the Knowable. The ratio of what is known to what is unknown may not be growing, as most suppose; it may be level…or it may even be decreasing. What say you?

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