Anxiety and frustration from not knowing

I have been somewhat unease in the last few years; uncomfortable with a lack of knowledge.  This is no knowledge that I would ever need to know, but the fact that some things are unknown has bothered me tremendously.   All my life I have always pride myself of knowing what things are, how they work, where they came from, where they are going.  Of course, I don’t claim to know all the answers, but I have always had the confidence that an answer exists.  Curiosity has always guided me to information resources that have made me feel “comfortable” with the world around me.  If it has to do with science, arts, philosophy, religion, and whatever area, I always had the comfort that even if I could not answer all my questions, knowing where to find the information, and knowing that some “answer” existed was comfort to me.  My confidence in science and logic, and my education and experience in these areas has made me very comfortable with the world around me. 

I remember when I was a kid back in the third grade playing on our backyard's farm irrigation ditches with other kids who had to stay home because we had the mumps.  We had made toy soldiers and army tanks out of sticks and had whole armies facing each other.  I was a little creative and brought in helicopters, but I remember wondering to myself how helicopters flew without wings.  No one could tell me, not even my third grade teacher when I went back to school.  I found a book on helicopters in our small school “library,” but it did not explain how they worked.  Some months later while in one of the marketplaces in Monterrey with my mother, I noticed a bookstore across the street and made my mother take me there although we managed to miss the bus she was planning on taking back to Villa de Garcia and had to wait two more hours for the next bus (I suspect that she did not mind missing the bus since it allowed her more time for shopping).  I found a book that explained how helicopter flew and I remember being as happy as the pigs in our farm getting a fresh pail of slop in their trough.  I knew how they flew!

School to me was just one giant smorgasbord of information on anything I wanted to know.  I can’t say was I was best student, but spending just about every evening in the public library allowed me to look up anything I could possibly think of questioning.  And, if they did not have the information, the librarians were more than willing to help get whatever I wanted.  Later, the university seemed like a four star restaurant compared to the smorgasbord in high school.  Majoring in engineering was open season on knowing how the world worked, the arts were fantastic, and the introduction to classical music and western history, Chinese culture and history, psychology, and literature were “mind-popping” new experiences that I could not get enough.  Later in Stanford, learning economics introduced me to how the “real” world worked and introduced me to how government social and economic policy is formulated.  That led me to want to work in Washington DC and I made my way to working in the policy making center of the country.  Every day was a new experience in learning something new.

Through all this time I came coming back to questions I had in college.  Questions that I had manage to answer, but have never been confident that I really knew the answers.  The questions arose in a course in modern physics and had to do with Einstein’s theory relativity (special and general).  Having more of a visual engineering view of the world, the “mind experiments” explaining the concepts had a difficult time clicking in my brain; a cognitive dissonance that I had a difficult time overcoming.  I could work out the mathematics and it made sense, but a thoroughly understanding always seemed to be elusive.  So for the next twenty-some years I would seek articles and read whatever information I could find on this topic until I felt comfortable what it meant and how it applies to the world and the universe.   Once I overcame it, I was in harmony with the state of knowledge and content with the state of the universe.

Although I did not pretend to have all the answers to my questions, for information that was simply not known, I was confident that there was a path forward to obtain that knowledge and knew there were many very smart people working on them and that someday we would have the answers.  If I was still alive, I will be able to read up on them and learn the answers. 

But that confidence has been shattered and in its place, replaced by an anxiety that there is something out there that not only we do not know, but we don’t know how to get to know it.  Of course, I’m talking about the thing that scientist have given the terms “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter.”  It is all around us affecting our lives and yet we cannot see it, we cannot feel it, and worse, we do not know what it is!

Dark energy is causing the expansion of the universe, and the term “dark energy” is a placeholder for our ignorance, representing the fact of cosmic acceleration without indicating its identity.  Einstein faced this problem in his relativity equations but he conveniently refers to it as a “cosmological constant.”  I guess he assumed some smart person in the future would figure it out?  A cosmological constant, like pi, is something my brain can handle, but dark energy is not a constant.  It has been over 15 years since this was first discovered and our ignorance about it has remained constant.  It has become a central problem in modern cosmology.  Astronomers have measured the acceleration rate and determined that dark energy constitutes more than two-thirds of the energy content of the cosmos, How can one be in a cage with a 200 pound gorilla and not know it is there?  The frustration of it all!

What is strange about dark energy is that the more the universe expands, the more dark energy there seems to be, and the more dark energy there is, the more it drives expansion.

  

So what can dark energy be?

Some scientist think that dark energy is the energy from quantum fluctuations in empty space, what they refer to as “vacuum energy.”  From general relativity, any energy has a gravitational effect. In this case, the energy would serve to accelerate cosmic expansion.  The only problem with that theory is that the amount of energy predicted by quantum fluctuations is much larger than the observed amount of dark energy.  Scientist who lean toward “String Theory” provide a second alternative for dark energy but it provides an uncountable number of possible values in their “string theory landscape” that would be impossible to calculate and verify through experiments. 

A possible third explanation is that the Theory of relativity breaks down for large distances.  Astronomers measuring far away supernovas (giant suns that blow up) have come to the conclusion that the rate that the universe is expanding is increasing, maybe by knowing this they can calculate the dark energy – if it is measurable and observable, by inference we will know what it is? This will also mean making adjustments to Einstein’s Theory – the perfect theory. 

Then there is an explanation for dark energy that for a “three dimensional engineer type,” would sound like science fiction - but it is my favorite and I hope someone is able to design a test to verify it.  It goes something like this:  Suppose that gravity can be influenced by something that we are not able to see?  A theory, known as membrane theory, extend our three dimensional rules into a higher-dimensional reality.  To try to imagine it, let’s take the moon as an example, it has a surface – a membrane - with stuff inside.  Suppose the universe, our universe that we know and love, can be represented as a surface membrane with an interior that we can see, but with extra dimensions that we cannot see.  These extra dimensions could have gravity or negative gravity and could be influencing our portion of our membrane that is the universe we can see.  It is conceivable that these extra dimension exerting gravity and “negative” gravity manifests itself as what we consider dark energy.  These are called membrane world models or “Braneworld” models.  Some scientist indicate that the Big Bang was the moment when our universe collided with the neighboring membrane. 

Braneworld theory sounds cool and exotic, but a bit farfetched.  The least farfetched seems to be the quantum physics approach modification of gravity.  There are people that know gravity and there are people that know quantum physics.  The problem is figuring out how they relate to each other so that we can know what dark energy really is. 

 

I wish I would had studied quantum physics and astronomy and be able to jump into that research to figure out what dark energy really is, maybe I would not feel so anxious about the void in knowledge.