The importance of a map
We might say a map is a representation of something else. A pirate’s map would represent an island or a strand, with a red X to mark the supposed location of the treasure chest. A navigation system in your phone, coupled with a map, performs a similar function in a much more refined and precise way; yet the principle is the same.
Which or what is the map of reality? Even better, allow me to ask: what reality really IS?
Such an ambitious query.
Let’s refer, for simplicity, just to the “mere” physical universe.
Armed with their senses, wits and guts, men and women advanced our collective knowledge of the portions of universe we can experience. The entire corpus of human knowledge, it’s actually another map. Or, as scientists would say, a model, or a series, structure, organism thereof.
They taught me that’s what science’s about. Observe, construct hypothesis, predictions, then craft experiments to verify them. Determine what’s true. And that is simply amazing, astonishing; just thinking about the technology involved in the creation and peruse of this article is staggering: the whole tech tree from the first tool ever made to telecommunication, microprocessors and whatnot… unbelievable.
And yet, something baffles me even more, or to better say, on another level or dimension. All that has ever been discovered, achieved and built… is based on a kind of a dream.
Not that is unreal, no. It’s the reality itself that poses a problem.
We achieve titanic feats, as well as menial tasks, by making use of an insanely complex technology (and ridiculously immense computational power), which exploits the measurable and predictable effects of this or that physical phenomenon.
What’s strange with this?
Let me quote Richard Feynman: “It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy IS.”
Even if scientific models get increasingly refined and become more and more precise or efficient, they are still – and always will be – models, or maps, of something else, something bigger, wider and fundamentally weird. The universe. Reality.
We aren’t able to grasp not even what energy is, one of the things we take for granted the most. We use it every day. We store it in batteries, extract it from many sources, understand that it equals mass times the squared speed of light; we literally breathe and metabolize it, we use it do write and display this article, we use it to think about the words in this article, and yet, no one knows exactly what it is, what it’s made of, its substance or nature.
We are familiar with its many manifestation – heat, electricity, movement or potential and so on – but those are all effects, symptoms of its working.
And what about time?
We don’t even agree on what space is.
We might bluntly reduce and approximate with this: you need not be a mechanic nor an engineer to drive your car. It works. That’s what matters for most people. But ultimately, it’s the act of wondering on the nature of things that allows mankind to shed some light on this or that aspect.
This light is nothing more than a matchstick burning in a dark cave at night. It’s all we have. And it is exhilarating.
So we keep wondering, wondering in the dark.
“He has even put eternity in their heart; yet mankind will never find out the work that the true God has made from start to finish.” – Ecclesiastes 3: 11