Martin Rees writes - Black holes are simpler than forests and science has its limits.

LB Comment: It's refreshing to see such an esteemed and qualified scientist write in such a way. I love the way humanity - particular individuals who are gifted, called and persistent, push into the seeming restraints of human understanding. And they push through. And make new discoveries that enrich and bless our world, that open our eyes to even more expansion of thought and good living on planet earth. But we don't get everything right, and some things may always remain a challenge to both our understanding and our ability to refine, manipulate and improve the way things are.

Here's more...

"Albert Einstein said that the ‘most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible’. He was right to be astonished. Human brains evolved to be adaptable, but our underlying neural architecture has barely changed since our ancestors roamed the savannah and coped with the challenges that life on it presented. It’s surely remarkable that these brains have allowed us to make sense of the quantum and the cosmos, notions far removed from the ‘commonsense’, everyday world in which we evolved.

"But I think science will hit the buffers at some point. There are two reasons why this might happen. The optimistic one is that we clean up and codify certain areas (such as atomic physics) to the point that there’s no more to say. A second, more worrying possibility is that we’ll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp. There might be concepts, crucial to a full understanding of physical reality, that we aren’t aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends Darwinism or meteorology. Some insights might have to await a post-human intelligence.

"Scientific knowledge is actually surprisingly ‘patchy’ – and the deepest mysteries often lie close by. Today, we can convincingly interpret measurements that reveal two black holes crashing together more than a billion light years from Earth. Meanwhile, we’ve made little progress in treating the common cold, despite great leaps forward in epidemiology. The fact that we can be confident of arcane and remote cosmic phenomena, and flummoxed by everyday things, isn’t really as paradoxical as it looks. Astronomy is far simpler than the biological and human sciences. Black holes, although they seem exotic to us, are among the uncomplicated entities in nature. They can be described exactly by simple equations."

LB Comment: Again, wonderful to find such humility in the example of one who is so knowledgeable and capable in his field(s) of study. I find this refreshing. And yet, I want to explore and discover as best I can, too, in the smaller worlds of my own life and existence. If nothing else - and I think there's a great deal more in purpose..., the Creator made us to be very curious creatures. I hope we can get things better as we press on, God helping us.