The New York Times recently featured a fascinating article. The whole article is worth reading (free registration at nytimes.com may be required to access it). I'll comment on excerpts here.
The Universe, Expanding Beyond All Understanding
By DENNIS OVERBYE
If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.
Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein. As the authors, who are physicists, write in a paper to be published in The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, “observers in our ‘island universe’ will be fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe.”
"...fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe." Hmm, the New York Times admits that humanity's scientific endeavor may fundamental limitations? Are they allowing a dangerous cat out of a formerly impenetrable bag?... A paragraph later, it happened again:
... it makes you wonder just how smug we should feel about our own knowledge. “There may be fundamentally important things that determine the universe that we can’t see,” Dr. Krauss said in an interview. “You can have right physics, but the evidence at hand could lead to the wrong conclusion. The same thing could be happening today.”
At this point, I expected Mr. Overbye might turn to Ecclesiates, Job, or Genesis. Instead, he spoke of the Big Bang, Einstein, Hubble, quasars, and dark energy. This "dark energy" is interesting, sounding necessarily metaphysical. The essay continued:
“This is even weirder,” Dr. Krauss said. “Five billion years ago dark energy was unobservable; 100 billion years from now it will become invisible again.”
Is Mr. Overbye a Christian setting the stage for a theological twist to this essay in the "Space and Cosmos" section of the New York Times? Without web access, I couldn't quickly search for his other works and background. (I did later and found no evidence of his religious beliefs, but that doesn't mean he has none).
Then this section really grabbed me:
... if relativity is right, [future astronomers] won’t be able to build telescopes that can see past the edge of the universe. It’s not too late to start thinking about sending out the robot probes that could drift down through alien skies eons from now with, if not us or our DNA, at least a few nuggets of wisdom — that the world is made of atoms and that it started with a bang.
The irony now at full measure, I quickly finished the last couple paragraphs of the essay to see that perhaps Mr. Overbye was purposeful in his irony. The "robot" idea is ironic, since he suggests it as a way to send our knowledge to those in the future who will be completely unable to discover it on their own. All the while, Mr. Overbye is not questioning our "knowledge". But maybe he is, as the article concludes:
The lesson in the meantime is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and we never will — a lesson that extends beyond astronomy.
“We have a tendency to put ourselves at the center of the universe,” Dr. Max Tegmark said. “We assume all we see is all there is.”
But, as Dr. Tegmark noted, Big Bang theorists already suppose that basic aspects of the universe are out of sight.
The reason we believe we live in a smooth, orderly universe instead of the chaotic one that is more likely, they say, is that the chaos has been hidden. According to the dominant theory of the Big Bang, known as inflation, an extremely violent version of dark energy blew it up a fraction of a second after time began, stretching and smoothing space and pushing all the wildness and chaos and even perhaps other universes out of the sky, where they will never be seen.
“Inflation tells us we live in a messy universe,” Dr. Tegmark said. Luckily we never have to confront it.
Ignorance is us, or is it bliss?
So it appears Mr. Overbye acknowledges that part of our empirical data is obscured by the ravages of time, remains theoretical, and that our knowledge is incomplete. But he seems to think we still have a great more knowledge now than far-future astronomers have and that somehow preserving our knowledge for them would be helpful.
But what if our "knowledge" now is completely wrong due to the fragmentary evidence we are examining? What if our eyes are veiled even now, at this supposed "early" age of a mere 14 billion years (estimated, observed, theorized)? How can we know that the cosmological data we gather now is not a mere shadow of the data that once existed?
What if today's scientists are those lost in the dark and someone, many eons ago, sent out probes filled with information about the true nature of the cosmos? Would modern scientists believe such messages if they received them? Or would they say that the messages are obvious frauds and superstitions because they do not match our most sophisticated observations and measurements?
I suspect the answer is that future scientists would laugh at our well-intended robot probes, and that current scientists would likewise dismiss any such "ancient wisdom" as primitive and downright medieval. One doesn't have to guess at the future response, but rather confirm it by the response of most current scientists who dismiss such wisdom openly and consistently. These ancient writings do in fact exist and are proven, reliable depictions of the origin, composition, and future of our universe and its inhabitants. They have been sent ahead to we who inhabit darker days, by those who saw Wisdom face-to-face. Strangely, they remain widely available but seldom read in our day. Their common names are Genesis, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Job, John, and Romans.
So true
What amazes me is that scientists try to explain everything with equations and then point to the equations and say, "see that is why". But God had to create the universe to adhere to those equations!
People often think that science and religion are at odds with each other. But, everytime a new discovery occurs, I think, "wow - God has created so many things for us to discover!"