Unknown, Not Unknowable

Life is full of questions, both big and small, that we don’t yet have answers to. But just because we may not know the answers yet doesn't mean they are unknowable. This idea is at the core of science, where researchers continuously pursue questions until they make progress, building upon the work of others before them. However, even the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians may write off some of the deepest philosophical questions as unanswerable or unknowable, especially when generations before them were unable to find a clear answer.

Our assumptions about these deep questions often inform many other layers of beliefs that we interact with on a regular basis. For example, after 100 years of believing that light formed waves like sound, Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect upturned the field of quantum mechanics and led to a number of rewritten theories. Whether or not we have free will directly impacts how and why we make decisions on a regular basis. The origins of life have profound implications on how we view the world and our place in it.

In some cases, it may seem reasonable to claim that a question is unknowable if we have exhausted every possibility and permutation based on a limited set of data points. But when we're talking about questions that are bigger than ourselves, this is not the case. The world is always changing, which means that there is always new information or perspectives to approach the same problem from a different angle. Given the enormous impact that some of these questions can have on our lives, as a society, we should always make space to collect new information and ideas and approach these problems over and over again in novel ways.

One of the biggest challenges in tackling these big questions is that they often require us to confront our own biases and assumptions. We may believe that certain things are impossible or unknowable simply because they go against our preconceived notions of how the world works. However, if we're willing to be open-minded and challenge our assumptions, we may find that what we thought was impossible is actually within our reach.

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