#illusion #certainty #reality
Certainty, order and control are something we strive for. We want to know what will happen next. We want to know there is some order or method to the madness that is our life. And if we can figure out this order/method, we may be able to control it.
For us, certainty, order and control are very important. So important in fact, that they are only less important than water and food according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The reality, however, is that we live in a chaotic, uncertain, world. The reality is that we, you or I, have much less control over our environments than we tell ourselves. It does not mean we do not try to control it, we certainly do. And sometimes we’re successful. And when we are successful, we make progress. And while this success can make us feel certain and in control, we simply are not. It is for this reason we create narratives that help us rationalize the chaos we don’t fully understand.
Let me give you an example about this illusion of certainty, order and control. Gravity is something we all feel. It is something we are all familiar with. It is something that we’re all affected by. It is something that as far as we know, affects everything in the known Universe (almost). OK, so what is it? The answer depends on when you asked it. 300,000 years ago, at the dawn of our species, it was probably the least of their concerns. They were too concerned with getting chased by saber-tooth tigers.
OK, how about more recently, 2400 years ago, during the time of Greece and Aristotle? Aristotle would have ascertained gravity was simply the act of different bodies returning to their natural place. He reasoned, for example, that since earth (heavier) sinks in water, its natural place (earth’s) is at the bottom and that water’s natural place is above earth’s. Similarly, air is lighter than both, and therefore its natural place is above them. And the force we feel as gravity, therefore, is those objects returning to their “natural place“. This reason, this explanation, worked for us for hundreds of years. It provided us with certainty and order. That was until Sir Issac Newton came along more than 2000 years later and theorized that bodies actually attracted each other proportionally to their mass (and inversely proportional to their distance).
Great. So gravity was not bodies returning to their natural place, as we’d been certain. Rather gravity is the force of two bodies attracting each other. And this theory, law in fact, worked fine for the next 200 years. What happened to certainty and order, you may ask. Well, in the early 1900s, a young patent clerk, a guy named Albert Einstein, said, you have gravity all wrong. Gravity is not two bodies attracting each other, but instead is what happens to bodies experiencing the fabric of space-time.
100 years later and we remain subscribed to Einstein’s theory. We’ve proven it to work… mostly. Thanks to his theory we were able to create nuclear power, send astronauts to the moon and create GPS. Yes, Einstein’s theory of general relativity explains, with certainty, how anything larger than an atom works in the Universe. But at the sub-atomic level, Einstein’s theory does not work. For that field of study, we have a different theory, Quantum Field Theory.
So back to my original question. What is gravity? I demonstrated to you that as we have learned more and progressed in our understanding of the world, so too, has the certainty of one of the most common forces in our Universe. As the years have passed, we have tried to bring order and control to this Universal force of nature. In the beginning it was of no concern, then we reasoned it as a natural place for bodies. Later, we reasoned it as bodies attracting each other. 100 years ago Einstein explained it was the effect of space-time. And more recently we realized at the sub-atomic level, even Einstein’s theories cannot explain how things work. How will we define gravity 50 years from now? 100 or even 1000 years from now?
As humans, we are born to try to make sense of our world. We are hungry for certainty, order and control. We need it as much as we need food (almost). Without it, our minds run wild and we are placed in a stressful state of mind. This makes us so uncomfortable that we look for answers. Most times we find them. And when we don’t, we reason ourselves to an answer… even that answer isn’t certain. Certainty, after all, is just an illusion.
