What We Still Don’t Know

Well, it almost goes without saying, a good deal of things as it turns out.

Astronomer Royal (now there’s an absolutely stupendous title to have!) Sir Martin Rees ponders a few of the great unsolved mysteries of the cosmos, in the process demonstrating once again that science is vastly more mysterious and intriguing than religion’s absurd yet surprisingly mundane contrivances could ever hope to be.

Aside from now fairly routine observations about the existence of life on other planets and conventional misconceptions about the atomic structure of matter, the most truly interesting bits come at the end, where he ventures into speculation about the theoretical “multiverse” and post-biological life, wondering along the way, as many of us doubtless have from time to time in our more elevated reveries, if we might possibly just be the product of someone else’s experiment…