So.... not only did my first foreign language text course I had set up fallen through (Voltaire's essay on epic poetry and the Civil War in France) because the prof became a provost, but now the two suggested professors and alternate text that was suggested to me fell through as well. This is after I was passed around from person to person for a Hannah Arendt reading course and for my Junior Paper. Academically, I feel very very insignificant right now, especially with how much I'm struggling in stat and econ. For the first time in my college career, I've actually not only wondered what would happen if but wished I had chosen a free state school where I actually would have mattered to someone.

On top of that, failure to get even into interviews for Scav Judge. I'll be honest, I shouldn't have even bothered to apply. I'm annoying and childish, not excitedly cool and carefree.

and at the bedrock of it all, crazy fear of inadequacy and future failure at life. I don't think I'll be able to get a job that I'll enjoy, find a woman to share it with, or be even half as successful as I've hoped to be so as not to disappoint myself or my parents. 

Outlook is bleak. 

My Future: Some assembly required; batteries not included.

In the 18^th century, Carolus Linnaeus introduced the binomial nomenclature system of naming species in Latin. At the turn of the century, in 1799, the metric system was adopted in France. In 1869, Russian Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev used his knowledge of the mass of the elements and their properties to construct the first periodic table.  Over time, each of these systems have been refined to become more and more precise as the times change. With the invention of polymerase chain reaction in genetics, more and more genomes are being sequenced and species are being recategorized based on genetic material as opposed to simple physiology.  The discovery of quantum mechanics resulted in the grouping of elements in to s-, p-, d-, and f-blocks and the discovery of the lanthanides and actinides further filled out the periodic table. The meter became defined by the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum, the second by the radioactive decay of caesium-133, Kelvin by the triple point of water, the mole by the number of atoms in a .012 kilogram sample of pure carbon-12. However, the one unit of measure (and an important one at that) that is still measured archaically using an actual physical object is the kilogram.  A kilogram is still equal to THE kilogram, the international prototype kilogram (IPK) kept at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Paris.

How Much We Don’t Know, By the Numbers

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, it was somewhat fashionable to declare the end of science. The 1880s and 1890s saw physicists at famous universities – Harvard and the University of Chicago respectively – declare that “the grand underlying principles have been firmly established…the future truths of physics are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals” (The Scientific Enterprise 16). Right at the turn of the century, from the 19^th to the 20^th, the Director of the US. Patent Office infamously claimed “everything that can be invented has been invented” and urged the closing of his office (Scientific Enterprise 16). What is most surprising however is that this arrogant attitude continues to persist, as recently as 2007, when a university student in a course entitled “The Growth of Science” in all seriousness and in response to the previous statements asked what really was left to be discovered. Such a ridiculously uninformed question that hints at the hubris of mankind requires as the only valid response a ridiculously arrogant calculation designed to create humble perspective.

            Even before proceeding very far into the calculation, an unfathomably large chunk of knowledge is already lost to us within the discipline of astronomy. If we divide the matter-energy of the entire universe into categories, we get the following numbers provided by NASA

Dark Energy and Dark Matter compose 95% of the universe, free hydrogen and helium 4%, stars and neutrinos the next 0.8% and the heavy elements (not hydrogen or helium) 0.2% . Considering that they are named dark because we only know that they exist, and not because we know what they are, we find that we know not 5% of the universe but what we might know can only constitute less than 5%. There could be even more of the universe that we can not even suppose exist, lowering that figure even more.

            From this point, it becomes a little more difficult to make estimates. How much do we really know about stars, neutrinos, free hydrogen and helium, and the heavy elements? Any which way of splitting up that 5% amongst the remaining sciences becomes exceedingly difficult due to overlap and quantifying knowledge. How does one weight knowledge of properties and interactions with other substances? So let us leave those alone for the time being and proceed with the .02% that is heavy elements in the universe, and allow how little we know about that .02%, which includes the entirety of Earth, to inform how little we know about the rest of reality.

The heavy elements category encompasses all of biology and a good chunk of the chemistry that isn’t lumped together with physics. Let us use what we know about Earth as that .02%. That .02% diminishes even further when we take biology into account. The biosphere is about 15 kilometers thick. Whereas the Earth is about 6,378 km in radius, so biology makes up about .02% of the heavy elements on Earth. As reported by Reuters, an estimated 18,000 to 55,000 species per year are going extinct due to habitat loss and their calculated existence in locations such as the rain forests[1]. The number of identified and catalogued modern species is put at 1,562,663[2] If we use the same study used to provide these figures to estimate the number of species, we get a figure of 30 – 50 million species, of which we have catalogued 3-5%. Of those species, just one of those species forms the basis for most if not all of applied science as well as the entirety social science. What is even more frustrating is that that one species changes so rapidly that they develop new desires and behaviors constantly, leaving applied science and social science without an end to research. And that one species that we might claim to know a lot about is only one of 50 million that inhabit .02% of the Earth’s radius (a much smaller term when you consider the volume), which is a tiny fraction of heavy elements in the universe, which in turn is only .02% of the matter-energy that makes up the universe.

While this leaves out all of earth science (though the accuracy of weather forecasts gives a good indication how much we really know about meteorology), and ignores all attempts at analyzing much of the rest of that 5% that it is even possible at this point to categorize as something that we might know about it, it is relatively safe to say – even with the sciences expanding at an astounding rate and becoming more and more democratic and more and more specialized – that we know nothing except the fact of our ignorance.

Though this does not explain how the misinformed notion that we know a large proportion of all there is to know was perpetuated, a guess can be ventured. Few - if any - serious scientists would dare claim that we know any amount close to all there is to know. Perhaps the reason (beyond the simplest answer of job security) is the approach that science takes to those things that we do know. Whereas the general populous approaches science for an answer to the question of “what do we know?”, the scientist approaches science demanding “What don’t we know?”. While the list of things that we do know is quite impressive and capable of occupying students up to and perhaps including the undergraduate level of education, it pales in comparison to the frightening holes in our knowledge (i.e. “what exactly is gravity or magnetism?”, “where and what is the 95% of the matter-energy in the universe that we can not see or find but know is there?”). The frightening truth is that if people still believe we know a lot, our education system is failing to teach science by failing to teach the scientific method of enquiry, without which one is hardly learning science.