Philosophy Now Forum

Modern Physics: “ I DON’T know what I don’t know.”
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I DON’T know what I don’t know what photon is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what electron is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what 4-D (etc) is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what SRT’s essence is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what dark mass is
I DON’T know what I don’t know what quantum gravity is.
Etc.
=========================.
And we do not know,
and we also do not know whether or not
we will ever know.
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The Lord./ Niels Bohr./
Does Modern Physics never strike you right?

Mephistopheles./ Wolfgang Pauli./
No, Lord ! I pity Physics only for its plight,
And in my doleful days it pains and sorely grieves me.
No wonder I complain – but who believes me?
/ The Blegdamsvej. Faust. 1932./
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socratus wrote:Modern Physics: “ I DON’T know what I don’t know.”

Your thesis is faulty and the attempt to discredit 'physics' fails. No banana for you!
'Science' doesn't 'know' anything. 'Science' isn't a person; people (some people) believe that they 'know'.
Scientists engage in the critical examination of what is perceived, increasing UNDERSTANDING (not 'knowing') all the time. The UNDERSTANDING of modern science is the most accurate of all previous understanding. 'Understanding' is a continuously growing fund of ever honing theories. Fundamentalists 'believe' that they 'know' (Truth), and there stagnate, ossify, scientists merely continue to examine and gain greater understanding all the time.
You enjoy the fruits of this 'modern science' every day, and probably do so more so every day! You thus display hypocrisy in your compulsive barrage of ineffectual lambasts against "Modern Physics".

Faust. 1932.

Nameless. 2010.
Catch up!

Never forget the symmetrising words of Slavoj Zizeck when he completed Rumsfeld triad of knowability (known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns) by adding the all important and frankly more interesting "unknown Knowns".

These are the unrecognised endemic assumptions and taken-for-granteds that go by unnoticed that have sometimes tragic effects on the way we think and pretend towards objectivity.

socratus wrote:Modern Physics: “ I DON’T know what I don’t know.”
===========.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what photon is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what electron is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what 4-D (etc) is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what SRT’s essence is.
I DON’T know what I don’t know what dark mass is
I DON’T know what I don’t know what quantum gravity is.
Etc.
=========================.
And we do not know,
and we also do not know whether or not
we will ever know.
===================.
The Lord./ Niels Bohr./
Does Modern Physics never strike you right?

Mephistopheles./ Wolfgang Pauli./
No, Lord ! I pity Physics only for its plight,
And in my doleful days it pains and sorely grieves me.
No wonder I complain – but who believes me?
/ The Blegdamsvej. Faust. 1932./
=============================.

Each 'thing' in your post describes a relationship we've observed or conceived of in nature enough times and with enough accuracy to justify giving it a name. At the end of the day all such things are defined (by us) in terms of how they relate to other things without the need of actually knowing what any of those things fundamentally are. This is the basic conundrum of science, which can (and does) accurately describe the relationships we see in the world around us, without explicitly saying (or knowing) what the things that relate together really are, or where they ultimately come from. We're at a position in our universe where we can't see 'the edges', or the 'bottom' or 'top', and all we can do is strike out looking for how the phenomenon we encounter relate to us and to each other. So you're correct when you say we don't really know 'what we don't know' about any of the catalogued scientific phenomenon, which all have this inherent relational description ultimately built upon 'nothing'. On the other hand, the relationships themselves are useful and important, and in essence define the thing that has the relationships, regardless of what it turns out to be or not be.

Science deals with all observable relationships, and this may be as much of 'the truth' as we'll ever be able to access. It's very hard to conceive otherwise as our brains themselves seem to work in terms of relationships too. There may well be a non-relational absolute truth out there, but our primitive relational-based ape brains aren't gonna be the ones that find it, all we will ever find are more relationships, in an endless but ever tightening circle. Maybe.