OK No Solution

Some questions cannot, and perhaps should not, be definitively answered.

Carl Sagan, in his best-selling book Cosmos, presented the idea that our universe is an elementary particle, and that every elementary particle is a whole universe. Is this idle dreaming, or is it ultimate truth?

Environmentalists increasingly subscribe to the Gaia paradigm, in which our home planet is a cosmic organism, with survival instincts, defense mechanisms and possibly a mind and spirit. How do we humans fit into it? Are we like mitochondria in a giant cell, or are we like viruses?

Mathematicians tell of fractals, infinitely complex structures arising from the simplest expressions, with patterns at once predictable and random, appearing throughout nature from atomic crystals to a universe filigreed with clusters of galaxies. The implication: It goes infinitely smaller and infinitely bigger. Is scale circular?

Albert Einstein said that matter is energy, and energy is matter. It only depends on point of view, or mode of consciousness. Modern scientists say that waves are particles, and that particles are waves; it depends on how we observe light. What do we actually see?

Protons are not smooth. Intuitively, most of us think of subatomic particles as little spheres, as in models of atoms and molecules. But experiments prove that high-speed particles ricochet off of protons as if the protons have irregular surfaces. How irregular?

The mathematician G. H. Hardy once said that pure mathematics is an ideal representation of reality. What is true is always true, and what is false is always false. This contrasts mathematics, he said, to physics, because speculation is irrelevant. Or is it?

In 1930, Kurt Godel injected an important qualification into the universe of mathematical truth: Certain statements cannot be proven either true or false.

Some questions cannot be answered. Maybe they shouldn't be.

Maybe we should allow for unsolvable mysteries, not only in mathematics, not only in science, but in all aspects of our lives.  Maybe we should rejoice in those things we cannot know.

Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 by Francisco Carrera.