By: Lawrence Krauss, Theoretical Physicist / Cosmologist
The picture that science presents to us is, in some sense, uncomfortable. We evolved as human beings, a few million years ago on the Savana in Africa, and we evolved to escape tigers, or lions, or predators, and so what makes common sense to us is the world on our scale. You know, how to throw a rock or a spear, or where to find a cave, and we didn’t evolve to understand quantum mechanics.
Therefore it’s not too surprising that on scales vastly different than the kind of experience we had as we were evolving as a species that nature seems strange, and sometimes almost unfathomable, certainly violates our common sense, or sense of what is common sense and what is intuition. But, as I like to say, the universe doesn’t care about our common sense. We have to force our ideas to conform with the evidence of reality rather than the other way around; and if reality seems strange, that’s okay. In fact, that’s what makes science so wonderful. It expands our minds because it forces us to accept possibilities which, in advance, we may never have thought was possible.
I’ve said that scientists love mysteries and we do. That’s the reason I’m a scientist, because it’s the puzzles of the universe that make it so exciting. Now, it is true that we want to solve- resolve those and solve those puzzles, that’s part of the fun of doing science, it's solving puzzles basically. But each time we do, new questions arise. And I think for many of us, just as in our lives, the searching is often much more profound than the finding. It’s the searching for answers through life, in some sense, that make life worth living. If we had all the answers we could just sit back and stare at our navels.
And, I think, what makes the search so exciting is that the answers are so surprising. What we’ve learned is that we are more insignificant than we ever could have imagined. You could get rid of us, and all the galaxies and everything we see in the universe would be largely the same. So we're insignificant on a scale that Copernicus never would have imagined.
And in addition, it turns out the future is miserable. So the two little lessons that I like to say, I like to give, is first we’re insignificant, and second the future is miserable. Now, you might think that should depress you, but I would argue. That in fact, it should embolden you, and provide you a different kind of consolation.
Because if the universe doesn’t care about us, and if we’re an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense, it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us. We provide our own meaning; and we are here by accidents, and we should enjoy our brief moment in the sun. We should make the most of our brief moment in the sun because this is all we have.
So for me, it should be spiritually uplifting that we’re not created with a purpose by someone who takes care of us like a mannequin or with strings determining everything. We determine our future and that makes our future more precious.