May 29, 2024 09:06 PM
(This post was last modified: May 29, 2024 09:09 PM by Magical Realist.)
https://bigthink.com/13-8/invisible-subs...rk-matter/
"There is something quite fascinating about not knowing what’s going on. This is where the boundaries of the known and the unknown meet, and where imagination takes over. We use what we know to guess our best path into what we don’t know. The “guess” here is, of course, educated. Experience and methodology lead the way, and we plow ahead trying to figure out what lies out there in the uncharted territories of reality. This is why, in a very concrete sense, science is a flirt with the unknown.
The history of science is full of mysterious and invisible substances, materials that were proposed into existence as experiments and observations led scientists astray. Even before science as we know it came to be, philosophers in Ancient Greece populated the cosmos with all sorts of substances that would perform whatever function necessary for their worldview to make sense. Around the 6th century BCE, the philosopher Anaximander proposed that the Universe is filled with the apeiron — the “boundless” source that gives rise to all that exists. Worlds emerge from the apeiron and, when the time is ripe, revert to it in an eternal dance of creation and destruction. About 300 years later, Aristotle proposed that there was no empty space and that everything was filled with an element the Greeks called ether (or “aether”). All planets and stars were also thought to be made of ether, being eternal and unchangeable. This was all ancient philosophical speculation that preceded scientific experimentation. Still, the habit of imagining strange substances did not stop with the advent of modern science..."
"There is something quite fascinating about not knowing what’s going on. This is where the boundaries of the known and the unknown meet, and where imagination takes over. We use what we know to guess our best path into what we don’t know. The “guess” here is, of course, educated. Experience and methodology lead the way, and we plow ahead trying to figure out what lies out there in the uncharted territories of reality. This is why, in a very concrete sense, science is a flirt with the unknown.
The history of science is full of mysterious and invisible substances, materials that were proposed into existence as experiments and observations led scientists astray. Even before science as we know it came to be, philosophers in Ancient Greece populated the cosmos with all sorts of substances that would perform whatever function necessary for their worldview to make sense. Around the 6th century BCE, the philosopher Anaximander proposed that the Universe is filled with the apeiron — the “boundless” source that gives rise to all that exists. Worlds emerge from the apeiron and, when the time is ripe, revert to it in an eternal dance of creation and destruction. About 300 years later, Aristotle proposed that there was no empty space and that everything was filled with an element the Greeks called ether (or “aether”). All planets and stars were also thought to be made of ether, being eternal and unchangeable. This was all ancient philosophical speculation that preceded scientific experimentation. Still, the habit of imagining strange substances did not stop with the advent of modern science..."