We are at university to have fun, make friends, to live independently…and somewhere amongst the heady mix of alcohol, sleep deprivation and instant noodles hopefully learn a thing or two. We do this because most of us acknowledge that we don’t actually know everything. We accept that the justification for spending three years without a full-time job is a perceived gain in academic knowledge and life skills. Who knows, maybe in our third year we will have actually learnt how to erase a Willow stamp within 24 hours.
Despite this begrudging recognition of our ignorance, there are some ideas that have been instilled in us from birth, to the point that they are considered facts of life that we take for granted, as certain as death and taxes. As such, it was slightly alarming to wake up a few weeks ago and read that everything we thought we understood about time and space could be wrong.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, though contentious at its conception, has grown to be accepted by the majority of the scientific community. His theory of Special Relativity postulates that the speed of light is the maximum speed that anything with mass can travel; a universal speed limit. Though Einstein may not have known the exact value of the speed of light when he suggested his theory, its basic idea has been held as true, without any exceptions, until this September. Antonio Ereditato and his team at CERN in Switzerland have seemingly found that some types of Neutrinos, a sub-atomic particle with a disputed but small non-zero mass, travel faster than the speed of light. Though these findings are very heavily disputed by the scientific community, if the results are confirmed by further testing as true, they present a paradigm shift from Einstein’s theory, and to assumptions that society has passively made for many decades. The results found at CERN imply that the law of cause and effect based on observation can no longer be held sacrosanct. For example, say a Neutrino was fired at a device which lit up as it was hit, we would see the device light up before we observed the Neutrino hitting the device.
One would think that it is the scientists, particularly physicists, who would be the most shaken by these findings; though this might be true to the extent that these results are most relevant in their fields, this is actually not the case. They seem to be one of fields of academic studies that accept change the most readily. It is in fact us, the laypeople, who find change the most worrying, as we are not often made to call into question not only what we call the “facts” of life, but the basis upon which we form our notion of “facts”.
Though these findings may incite various feelings ranging from excitement to confusion in us, they are at the very least a sobering reminder that not only do we not know everything, but also that there are arguably very few absolute truths, and that we in “fact” know nearly nothing.
“there are arguably very few absolute truths”
Going by the rest of the article, I will interpret this to mean “there are arguably very few absolute truths that we can know are truths”. There could be very many absolute truths; the problem, as your article highlights, is how to *know* they are the truth. There could always be a new scientific discovery which supersedes previous ‘truth’.
Ultimately, Descartes and his extreme skepticism of “cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) reveals the only thing we can be sure of: one’s own existence. Yet even this can be reduced, as the concept of a persistent self (‘I’) may be nothing more than an apparent cultural artifact. In which case, all we can be sure of is that “something is thinking”, or “thought is occurring”.