You may recognize the title of this article as a line from a Joni Mitchell song. I found it so moving that it has stuck with me since I first heard it so many years ago. All recorded history is replete with evidence of how the human race has dreamed of flat tires by creating models of the physical universe that were later found to be wrong. One of the most famous was a model of the Earth as the center of the universe. When a person observes the ever-changing position of the sun and moon throughout a diurnal cycle and links that information to the idea that the Earth appears to be still, it is not surprising that the intuitive conclusion is that the heavens are moving around. a planet located in the center.
In modern times, the prevailing opinion as to why the masses hated to give up on this idea, even when mathematical evidence to the contrary was presented, was that being on a planet that was at the center of the universe also included a privileged position for its inhabitants. . with the creator of that universe. But that’s not quite the reason behind the lighting delay. History education often focuses on the few brilliant minds that came and got us out of these Dark Ages ideas. What history generally does not show are the brilliant minds who devised equally impressive mathematical models that solidified accepted notions. The Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolomy built a very sophisticated gear machine that not only demonstrated the sun’s travel around the Earth, but even explained the retrograde motion of the planets known at the time. This model was so overwhelmingly convincing that it stood for almost 1000 years. Although his idea had fallen out of favor in 1492, Ptolomy’s work remained so revered that Columbus used his maps of the world when he set sail to find new lands. The diagrams on these maps were precisely why Columbus thought he had landed in India.
Given the sophistication of our technology, we are likely to discredit any notion that we live in an age of limiting patterns like the one in the example above. The truth is, instead of building precisely engineered models with gears, we use powerful supercomputers to mathematically extrapolate the motion of the heavens over eons of time. This is exactly how the Princeton professors developed the theory of dark matter and dark energy. The Ptolomy machine perfectly represented the data collected from the observation. In other words, Ptolomy already knew what the result should be before building the machine.
The Princeton supercomputer experiment did the exact opposite. The teachers connected the data obtained by observing the universe and then asked the computer to spin the universe through billions of years of motion. To his surprise, the entire universe sank into oblivion. They deduced that there simply had to be more gravity present than could be explained by the observable mass and that the additional gravity had to be what held the universe together. From this theory, they developed an accurate mathematical model to account for the additional gravity. In this model, the universe is made up of only 4% visible matter, 22% cold dark matter, and 75% dark energy. So far, this formula has withstood rigorous research. In fact, if the percentages are changed just a little, computer models cause the universe to fall apart. The real question is, will this theory hold up over time? Ptolomy’s theory of a geocentric universe stood for a millennium. Perhaps as telescopes become more powerful and varied, the observed data will change. This breakthrough recently changed our ideas about how fast we think our own galaxy is spinning. Or perhaps another theory will emerge to replace the current idea. Remember that a heliocentric system eventually replaced the long-standing Ptolomy paradigm.
For many laymen, ideas about cosmology are just mental sweets. They don’t seem to have any real relationship to everyday life. But there are many limiting models in recent history that do. In the 1920s, people were so in love with the novelty of the first electroencephalogram (EEG) measuring brain waves that they were sure it was a test of telepathy. Today, neurologists claim to measure exact thoughts because they have developed a way to control a robotic arm to mimic the movement of a monkey’s arm by simply mapping the neurons that fire when the monkey thinks to move its arm. This is a breakthrough that will lead to the development of devices that will unlock a quadriplegic’s ability to manipulate objects again. While this achievement is worthy of celebration, we must also be careful not to lock ourselves into a limiting pattern by stating that actual thought energy is being recorded. Brain activity is the shadow of the thought process. For example, if you are singing a song in your head, your brain activity can be measured and recorded, but not the song itself. Japanese scientists have gone a step further in realizing this type of dream by claiming that they can externally reproduce an image that the eyes see simply by measuring and recording a very specific brain activity associated with vision. Again, this is a breakthrough in brain research, but are you measuring thought energy?
From a technological point of view, we are on the verge of several important advances in research, such as those already mentioned. Great care must be taken in the way we build our models so as not to fall into Ptolomy’s trap of framing our ideas around a limiting concept. Otherwise, another millennium may pass before a brilliant mind appears showing that we were simply dreaming about flat tires.