Page:Amazing Stories-1928-08.djvu/7

Volume 3	The Magazine of Scientifiction	August, 1928 No. 5

n a world wherein we pride ourselves that we know practically everything that is to be known it is astounding to find the tremendous amount of big voids of which we have not even the slightest conception. Our libraries, our text books and other books of instruction are full of the finite and tangible things, but you will find comparatively few books that tell you about the great world of the unknowns.

There is, for instance, one class of unknowns which probably will remain unknown and not understood for centuries and eons to come. We talk glibly about electricity, light, heat, gravitation, and hundreds of other subjects. Yet, all of these subjects are really unknown to us. By means of our senses, we can keep in touch with these things through the impressions that they give us, but beyond that, there is the great abyss of the unknown, for we do not know what electricity is; we do not know what light is, in their ultimate states, and there is practically nothing in the entire world that surrounds us, that we know anything about at all. You can pick up almost any object; you can look at almost any thing, alive or dead, or inanimate, and you will know nothing at all about it. You can pick up a pebble, and a chemist may tell you its chemical formula and what it is made of, but beyond that he knows nothing. He will tell you about its protons and electrons, atoms, molecules, that constitute the parts of the pebble, but he will not be able to tell you what holds the particles together, and he has only the vaguest ideas what the ultimate constitution of the pebble is.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to matter, we know nothing at all about it. It is a great unknown to us. Some scientists hold that matter is only another word for force and energy, but these, at best, are only meaningless terms—a handle for our ignorance. We look at the simplest of plants; a blade of grass that we see grow, and no scientist in the whole world can tell you exactly what makes it grow, and why it does grow, and why it is alive in comparison to the pebble, which is dead and lifeless. I need hardly touch upon the unknown properties of life, which have puzzled humanity ever since the dawn of reasoning. We have not the slightest conception just what life is; what it is composed of, and what the mysterious forces are that distinguish life from lifeless matter.

Unfortunately for us, we have only five senses, and these five senses are wholly inadequate to properly gauge our surroundings. Perhaps if we had twenty or thirty different senses, we would know more about the world in which we live, but even then, we would not know all about it, For instance, we have no sense at all when it comes to grasping the infinite; the best we can do is to start shuddering. If we keep on thinking long enough about the infinite, we become inmates for an insane asylum. Thus there is the infinity of time and of space, and of everything else. We believe that the thing we call, arbitrarily, time, cannot have a beginning, logically, and cannot have an end. You can destroy the entire universe, and still, something must be going on thereafter. It is the same with space. We believe that no matter how far we go out into space, there can be no end. No matter in what direction you go, it will be endless. But what is endless? No one knows.

Immediately the brain starts reeling if you give this serious. consideration and dwell upon it for any great length of time. Perhaps there is a good answer to all this, if we had a sense to interpret it correctly, but it is simply another of the great unknowns which we probably will never comprehend.

Then there are all sorts of vibrations around us that we only dimly realize. For us they belong to the great unknown. X-rays, so far, are the highest in the vibration spectrum. These rays vibrate at the enormous rapidity of from 288,230,376,151,711,744 to 2,305,843,009,213,693,952 vibrations per second. There are, however, other vibrations beyond even the X-ray, but nothing is known about these.

Coming nearer home, and to our own bodies, in which one would think everything knowable would be known, we face, perhaps, one of the greatest abysses of the unknowns. We only know a small fraction of a per cent of what is going on in our own bodies. Up to a few centuries ago (William Harvey, 1619), we did not even know that blood circulated in our bodies, but there are thousands of other functions and actions, of which we are totally ignorant. We know very little of the gland functions, and while we can dissect the brain of the human being, only comparatively little is known about it.

An actor or an actress will learn an entire play by heart, never missing a word. A composer or a good musician may know hundreds or even thousands of different musical scores by heart, but we have not the slightest idea how all this works, and what happens in the ultimate inside of our brains to make this possible.

And as concerns the eye, here we have the perfect television apparatus, much more perfect than we can ever hope to construct, for, unlike the photographic camera, we can actually see in different colors. Yet, the eye. is only a photographic camera, except, that it is a much better one than human beings have ever been able to construct. What happens between the eye and the brain that makes us conscious of “seeing?” This belongs in the classification of the great unknown. Nothing at all certain is known about it. It is so with most of our senses, as, for instance, hearing. We hear all sorts of sounds and can distinguish them, but how these are conveyed to our consciousness and what is really meant by the term “hearing,” no one knows.

Then, when it comes to the certain thing that we are pleased to call the human soul, we have not the remotest idea what we mean by it; we don’t even know the seat of the soul. We do not know whether it permeates our entire body; whether it is located in our heart, in our lungs, in our brain or in a certain gland. We simply do not know. Much worse, we do not know what the soul’s function is. We know there is something that distinguishes us from a dog or a lion or a bird, but what that certain something is, we haven’t the faintest idea. It all belongs to the great universe of the unknown.

The list might be extended indefinitely, and perpetually, which should sober us up considerably. Because, when we come right down to it, our understanding of practically everything is so frightfully slight, that we must stand aghast at our colossal ignorance in all directions.