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As someone not involved in the field, I have always gotten the impression that all the major questions are settled, the processes are understood and that the wo
by JackFr 5y ago
As someone not involved in the field, I have always gotten the impression that all the major questions are settled, the processes are understood and that the work being done by active astronomers is really only at the margins, fleshing out the details in a word. And I think that's a view often promoted by scientists and the popular press, for the reasons that we have gained a tremendous understanding of the univers over the past 500 years, heck over the past 50 years, and no one wants to focus on talking about what we don't understand.
And then you see stuff like this and Oumumamua and its exciting and interesting and then you begin to realize that there's tons of stuff we really have no idea about, that at best we can make plausible explanations and try to rely on Occam's Razor and parsimonous assumptions.
I wish there were more of this because I find it delightful and inspiring.
- temp0826 5y ago>> I have always gotten the impression that all the major questions are settled This is unfortunate- feels like that mindset could stifle innovation
- sfifs 5y agoWell current mainstream cosmologists claim they literally don't know what 80% of the universe is made up of (that's why "dark" matter). So...
- JackFr 5y agoIt’s funny — that’s a pet peeve of mine too. To read the popular press you don’t get that impression at all. In fact it’s all authoritative statements about the “best map of far matter yet” or some other conclusion about dark matter. And if (for instance in the comments section of HN) one brings up the fact that they have no idea and dark matter is just a plug between what we know about gravity and what we observe in the EM spectrum, one often gets shouted down.
- robbomacrae 5y agoI think there is something to this.. possibly as a side effect for how knowledge is distributed. We are told about the discoveries and the things we found out. We are not told about everything else there is yet to discover, partly because its mostly unknown unknowns.. and it takes a fair bit of digging just to find out what the current big unsolved mysteries are. It's like the more you know the more you realize you don't know. I think it would greatly benefit all of us if we found a way to focus more on what we don't know.