On the radio as I was driving to work this morning, I heard a report about an exciting discovery in outer space. I’m not sure what exactly has been discovered. And nor, as it turns out, are the scientists. They haven’t really discovered ‘something’. What they’ve discovered, is that there’s ‘something there’. But they don’t know what the ‘something’ is. They seem to have a plan though. They’re going to do some clever stuff with frequencies, based on trial and error. It all sounds very scientific. 

Much of the report was concerned with a debate around an interesting question. Is it true, the reporter asked, that the more we know, the less we know? Well, no. Obviously not. The more we know, the more we know. Some of the stuff we know is about as useful, say, as the discovery that there’s something indeterminate in outer space. But that’s still more than we knew before. Clearly what the reporter really meant, was that the more we know, the more we realise how little we know. And that’s true, I guess. The more we know, the more our frame of reference expands. So we’re aware of more and more stuff that we might want to find out about. The neat boundary around our existence moves a little bit further out, and we find we haven’t filled in quite as much of the space inside.

So in a weird way, I suppose the discovery of something we know nothing about is pretty exciting, after all. Because what we’ve discovered, is that there’s more out there than we knew there was. And that we don’t even know how to find out what it is yet. So we’re nowhere near as close to knowing all there is to know as we thought we were. And the least exciting thing ever would have to be the certain knowledge that there are no surprises left.