Ignorance Lies in the Details
When the MeerKAT First Light telescope’s 16 working dishes produced their first image of the distant sky, they revealed 1,300 galaxies in a tiny part of sky where previously astronomers had counted only 700. Eventually, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest telescope will have an array of 64 dishes. Imagine the detail.
Thirteen hundred galaxies! Figure an average of 200 billion suns per galaxy. So, maybe 260 trillion stars. And soon MeerKAT’s full 64-dish array will probably identify more in that celestial segment that takes up only one hundredth of the sky. Do some extrapolating, and you’ll have mind-boggling numbers (as though 260 trillion isn’t mind-boggling enough).
So, for all of human history, no one has ever known, until recently, that that portion of the sky was so dense with galaxies. Now we know, but we still don’t see all the detail, and even the completed MeerKAT’s array will not reveal everything out there.
What can we do with all this new detail? Will it add to our understanding and give us wisdom?
Uncountable stars are not the only instance of overwhelming detail in our lives. Take the instance of a computer-assisted proof announced by Marijn Heule, Oliver Kullman, and Victor Marek as an example of something so detailed that it is in a sense useless.* Their computer-generated proof involving the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem produced a file that has 200 terabytes that the authors have reduced to 68 gigabytes. If you wanted to download it, you would need about 30,000 hours of computer time. Then what would you do with it? If it takes 30,000 hours just to download, what would it take to read through and check the proof?
“χρὴ εὖ μάλα πολλῶν ἵστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι,” wrote Heraclitus. Loosely: “Men who love wisdom must certainly ask about many things.” He also wrote (I’m paraphrasing here) that even though acquiring facts is necessary for wisdom, facts do not of themselves guarantee either wisdom or understanding. The MeerKat’s completed array will expose us to more galaxies than we could possibly ever fully study and more mysteries than we could possibly ever fully solve. And no one will sit down with 30,000 hours of download to laboriously read through a proof for Pythagorean triples to make sure it all makes perfect sense.
Both the MeerKAT discovery and the computer proof demonstrate that seven billion currently living humans have access to more information, more facts, than all 100,000,000,000 human predecessors combined. Yet, here we are, still pondering “meaning,” still befuddled, still seeking “wisdom.”
Categories and patterns are our only path to “wisdom” and understanding. We can’t put all the details in our brains. We have to simplify, to categorize. The problem is that in putting so much into any classification, we might throw in something that doesn’t truly belong, but rather just has the semblance—on its surface—of belonging. To truly examine the details of every detail takes us into spirals that inevitably open up more spirals. (That, for example, is what physicists are now discovering about quarks. They knew that three quarks combined to make protons and neutrons, but now they suspect that four quarks can combine to make various tetraquarks. What’s next? A pentaquark? A hexaquark?)
Maybe that is why we run to biases and prejudices as secure “wisdom” regardless of our supposed sophistication in acquiring information. Ironic, isn’t it? We gather details and end up with simplifications.
*Nature 534, 17–18 (02 June 2016) doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19990
When the MeerKAT First Light telescope’s 16 working dishes produced their first image of the distant sky, they revealed 1,300 galaxies in a tiny part of sky where previously astronomers had counted only 700. Eventually, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest telescope will have an array of 64 dishes. Imagine the detail.
Thirteen hundred galaxies! Figure an average of 200 billion suns per galaxy. So, maybe 260 trillion stars. And soon MeerKAT’s full 64-dish array will probably identify more in that celestial segment that takes up only one hundredth of the sky. Do some extrapolating, and you’ll have mind-boggling numbers (as though 260 trillion isn’t mind-boggling enough).
So, for all of human history, no one has ever known, until recently, that that portion of the sky was so dense with galaxies. Now we know, but we still don’t see all the detail, and even the completed MeerKAT’s array will not reveal everything out there.
What can we do with all this new detail? Will it add to our understanding and give us wisdom?
Uncountable stars are not the only instance of overwhelming detail in our lives. Take the instance of a computer-assisted proof announced by Marijn Heule, Oliver Kullman, and Victor Marek as an example of something so detailed that it is in a sense useless.* Their computer-generated proof involving the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem produced a file that has 200 terabytes that the authors have reduced to 68 gigabytes. If you wanted to download it, you would need about 30,000 hours of computer time. Then what would you do with it? If it takes 30,000 hours just to download, what would it take to read through and check the proof?
“χρὴ εὖ μάλα πολλῶν ἵστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι,” wrote Heraclitus. Loosely: “Men who love wisdom must certainly ask about many things.” He also wrote (I’m paraphrasing here) that even though acquiring facts is necessary for wisdom, facts do not of themselves guarantee either wisdom or understanding. The MeerKat’s completed array will expose us to more galaxies than we could possibly ever fully study and more mysteries than we could possibly ever fully solve. And no one will sit down with 30,000 hours of download to laboriously read through a proof for Pythagorean triples to make sure it all makes perfect sense.
Both the MeerKAT discovery and the computer proof demonstrate that seven billion currently living humans have access to more information, more facts, than all 100,000,000,000 human predecessors combined. Yet, here we are, still pondering “meaning,” still befuddled, still seeking “wisdom.”
Categories and patterns are our only path to “wisdom” and understanding. We can’t put all the details in our brains. We have to simplify, to categorize. The problem is that in putting so much into any classification, we might throw in something that doesn’t truly belong, but rather just has the semblance—on its surface—of belonging. To truly examine the details of every detail takes us into spirals that inevitably open up more spirals. (That, for example, is what physicists are now discovering about quarks. They knew that three quarks combined to make protons and neutrons, but now they suspect that four quarks can combine to make various tetraquarks. What’s next? A pentaquark? A hexaquark?)
Maybe that is why we run to biases and prejudices as secure “wisdom” regardless of our supposed sophistication in acquiring information. Ironic, isn’t it? We gather details and end up with simplifications.
*Nature 534, 17–18 (02 June 2016) doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19990
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