The Limits of Credulity:

Don’t berate yourself for being wrong. History has proven us to be wrong about practically everything. Never has anyone predicted the future accurately. Everyone knows successful people learn from their errors. Failures give up after mistakes. Captains of industry get up, dust themselves off and try again, less right than persistent. If you predicted the rise and fall of the Market slightly better than 50 percent of the time, you’d be a rich investor.
I underestimated the Coronavirus’s effect having very reasonably looked at the small outbreaks from the virus’s close relatives SARS and MERS, both of which affected thousands of people with eruptions lasting only about 12-16 weeks all told. By comparison, SARS-Cov-2, a nearly identical and strongly related virus though less lethal, was far more persistent and may even prove endemic. I badly underestimated the virus early on.  It was infecting few people then, yet now shows no signs of fading after killing almost 200,000 Americans.
“Listen to the science” is the mantra of our day. The single advantage science has over other forms of reasoning is that practical, observable truths are nearly always proven wrong.
Science is taught by brilliant persons whose intellectual powers are beyond my own. Yet science history is a graveyard about concepts supported by observation, later found wrong one after the other. People tell you science is where it’s at. Art and music and religion are all impractical and a waste of effort. Yet I would submit to you that no one has ever proved Mozart or Shakespeare wrong, and our cultural myths, technically disproven, continue to resonate, part of a personal and inner truth. Not so with science. Which say, non science pursuits help us to reach highly permanent truth. Though people build upon scientific scaffolds, as they say, stand on giant’s shoulders, we have not choice but to rid ourselves of what isn’t valid. Some examples: spontaneous generation, inheritance of acquired characteristics, alchemy, Galenic medicine, homeopathy, mesmerism, BF Skinnerism, Freudian and Jungian analysis, the phlogiston, the geocentric Ptolemaic universe, and flat earth.
In Junior High, I was taught about an eternal Universe in Steady State, an idea I came to accept. But Hubble had discovered an expanding Cosmos decades before I was born. Stars were fleeing at a velocity roughly proportionate to their distance, as manifest by a redshift of their light. Extrapolators accepted that the entire universe expanded from the size of less than a pinhole. This was doctrine by the time I was in high school. My early scientific education was behind the times. The Steady State and Big Bang theories were presented side by side, as fodder for debate. Some of us preferred one or the other alternative. I personally liked the Steady State, yet the arguments even at the High School level for the Big Bang won out. Arno Penzias, in 1964, found the cosmic background radiation signal the explosion at the birth of the universe. The vindication of the Big Bang theory trickled intto my High School science classes years after Penzias. Everyone accepted it as proved.
Yet it was only in the 1980s after I finished medical school, I read that expansion of the Universe at a constant rate as dictated by the Hubble Constant, some 70 Km/sec per Megaparsec distance was unsupportable. The Universe is more extensive than would be dictated by these recessional velocities. There needed to be a corrective in the early expansion of the Universe called Inflation as championed by Alan Guth. It is said we recall exactly when something life-changing as when Kennedy was shot. I remember when I read about Inflation in a Scientific American Magazine aboard an Airplane on the way to an interview. I still recall being awed by this revolutionary idea, so much that I see myself coming down the stairs off the plane and into the airport. Eventually, the early universe’s Inflation, which happened before the universe 10 to the -34 seconds old, was consistent with experimental data. Inflation solves so many problems with simple Hubble expansion all at once. Guth started looking into the issue of the lack of monopoles. Still, the notion of a simple Hubble expansion is beset by many other conundrums, the flatness of the universe, the need for specific initial conditions, effects of masses on one another. Thus Inflation seems to have solved many issues at once.
Other problems with the Big Bang: One is broken symmetry. All the matter that we now sense around us when the Universe came into being was accompanied by antimatter. Matter and antimatter collisions end in mutually assured destruction. It is hard to accept that all we see from the trees in the backyard to stars and planets come from the merest excess of matter over antimatter. Minuscule quantities of antimatter are around today, mostly made in cyclotrons.
Yet subsequent careful measurements have made necessary the presence of both matter and energy beyond human’s ability to detect them. Ordinary matter that we know and love comprises only about 4 percent of all the universe’s matter and energy. The rest 96% of the Universe is made of insensate, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. That 4% to 96% ratio is similar in our human genome. Only about 4% of genes translate into proteins. For the remaining 96% of the DNA, the purpose is mostly unknown. So we have Dark Matter/Energy and Dark genes.
There remains far more beyond our grasp in the Universe and in ourselves.
I never could begin to imagine that all of the matter of the entire Universe, all planets and stars and galaxies, I’m told there are at least 100 B of those many with 100 B stars, could have been one day some 13.8 B years ago, packed into a space smaller than a pinhole. Then take the sudden tremendous expansion of the universe that occurred in the earliest billionth of billion billionth seconds of birth, the merest excess of matter over antimatter comprising Everything. What about the 4 percent? Now I’m aware of how in science we are told, “Don’t listen to your common sense! Common sense will throw you off.” But our equations and theories and what is found in experiment must always light your way. But still, I can’t imagine it, and that is even knowing that all of this matter wasn’t matter as I see it today and was at the very start of things, pouring out ex nihilo that is from nothing to something to Everything. If I can’t fathom it, I have trouble believing it.
Our forebears were ignorant of modern physics, couldn’t have imagined the models modern mavens have come up with. The relatively simple notion of a Universe expansion of velocities proportionate to the distance of objects has a long list of inconsistencies. This has sent me into a state of incredulity. All of this is due to mathematical unsophistication and my limited mental ability.
OR: and who am I to say this? A chain of inconsistencies and very need for correctives resembles the junkyard of past ideas, particularly the Ptolemaic model of the Universe in the Middle Ages. The Ptolemaic model also kept on requiring correctives and epicycles until Copernicus and Galileo realized a fundamentally different model was needed in which all heavenly bodies were not orbiting the Earth but revolved about the Sun and other bodies, a simple insight. Such a fundamental revolution in thought will be what is required in the not too distant future.
I have been wrong so many times. Best to pick myself up, dust off, and ask, what are the limits of credulity?