Physicists must accept that some things are unknowable
The Universe may be truly infinite, but our understanding of it never will be. Here’s why.
“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” –Nicolaus Copernicus
One of the ultimate questions about our Universe is the question of where all of this came from. When we discovered that the grand spirals in the sky were actually galaxies not so different from our Milky Way all unto themselves, it paved the way for us to truly — for the first time — understand the scope and scale of all that we can perceive. These distant “island Universes” weren’t contained within the Milky Way, but were collections of billions or even trillions of stars, separated by millions or even billions of light years across the cosmos.
When we found that the more distant a galaxy was from us, on average, the faster it appeared to be receding from our perspective, an intriguing possibility opened up, consistent with Einstein’s General Relativity: perhaps the galaxies were not all speeding away from our location, but the fabric of space itself…
