Every generation believes it is at the cutting edge, that we know everything we need to. It appears the society we live in could be made no other way, that progress has been made to get us to this apogee of civilisation. Both the Greeks and the Aztecs appear to have believed they had found the answers, as do most “civilised” societies, wherever they may be. No doubt Christians in the middle ages were glad to have resolved the mysteries of creation and to have a book of God’s laws they could believe in. Pity the poor pagans making pointless sacrifices, or the barely civilised natives of South America, they would not be going to Heaven. For in that moment God had given us all the answers. Come the industrial revolution and modern science, huge progress was made and the daily grind became steadily more distant. There were sewers, machines that milled and a better form of transport than the horse. We finally knew the shape of the world and could communicate across it, what more did we need? All we could eat was in a shop nearby.

Now we are in a new era of instant communication, we have atomic power and have visited the moon. We understand our own recipe, DNA, and can scan our own brains. The Universe started with the Big Bang and has been mapped. We even have the power to destroy our own planet. What more do we need to know?

That is the hubris of the human condition. We only see what we know and look back in pity and despair on our deluded forebears. Yet the world moves on dynamically outside our ken, at it’s own glacial speed, in ways we have yet to fathom. While we are proud to have split the atom and discovered the Higgs boson, we already sense this this is just the tip of the quantum iceberg. When we discovered the power of splitting the atom we thought we had solved our energy needs and in the rush of that discovery huge mistakes were made. Many lives were lost. Controlling nuclear fission turned out to be much more complicated than we had ever dreamed, while the cost of nuclear waste disposal turns out to be higher than the cost of nuclear reactor construction.

Dounreay Prototype Fast Reactor (PFR) ©z360.com 1999

There is a universe of quantum effects which defeats our senses and understanding. Our logical and classical consciousness cannot comprehend matter which has properties of both waves and particles. Put simply, the quantum world is invisible, antithetical and incomprehensible to us. Einstein himself, a founder of quantum physics, had a great deal of difficulty with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, believing that “He (god) does not play dice”, and this conundrum has yet to be fully resolved. Nevertheless the existence of quantum entanglement or as Einstein called it ”spooky action at a distance” has not been disproven. Thus instead of becoming more comprehensible our sense of the world is slipping away into multiverses, live or dead cats and the flapping of a butterflies wing which can change everything. There are no longer truths, only possibilities. Maybe space itself has an atomic structure, currently unknown to us. We are moving into a world we cannot see, our senses blind to the machinations of the quantum world. Until recently we did not need to know this information to survive, the evolution of our senses has failed to keep up with our theoretical knowledge. In this situation mistakes are easily made.

Now we are aware of it, the effects of Quantum Mechanics, discovered in 1900 by Max Planck, appear all around us. Your USB stick uses quantum tunnelling, as does in effect the light switch, never mind the laser, transistor and LED bulb. That all seems quite sensible, but a new field is opening up called Quantum Biology, telling us that quantum effects are an integral part of living phenomena. So we think we know everything, but cannot explain the sense of smell. There are quantum effects at work here, and the harder you look, the more they start cropping up everywhere. It is a matter of asking the right questions. The tennis player can hit a ball that theoretically he has not had time to react to. A dog can smell things that aren’t there. A human eye can detect a single photon. Animals can navigate using the inclination of the magnetic field of the earth. These phenomena are believed to be caused by quantum effects. Indeed, quantum wave function collapse might be the root of our consciousness. Most vitally of all photosynthesis (used by all plants) appears to use quantum coherence. In other words, we really know nothing about how the world really works down at the atomic level. We may have an inkling, but there is a whole new science here to be discovered, which will in turn make what we believe now into a vaguely ridiculous approximation. Yes our descendants will laugh at our naivety, and so it will continue.

Update 09/05/21

Our profound lack of self-knowledge is explained in the book The Idea of the Brain by Matthew Cobb (2020). We have no idea how the panoply of medicinal drugs (Librium, Vallium, SSRi’s) actually work. We do know the mind invents what we perceive, just one example being the invisible blind spot where the optic nerve enters the eye. Put simply, if we do not know how the brain works, how can we really know anything.
Despite a solid bedrock of understanding, we have no clear comprehension about how billions, or millions, or thousands, or even tens of neutrons work together to produce the brain’s activity.
Or as Olaf Sporns has put it:
Neuroscience still largely lacks organising principles or a theoretical framework for converting brain data into fundamental knowledge and understanding.

Matthew Cobb finishes his Introduction with this sentence:
The four most important words in science are “We do not know”.

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