We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

by Jorge Cham

We boiled down our list of the universe’s ingredients from infinitely long to the hundred or so elements of the periodic table and then to only three particles.

There’s actually no size to them at all.32 And since you’re made of particles, that means you’re not mostly empty

gravity dominates at the scale of planets and galaxies: because all the other forces are in balance.

If gravity was just a force between objects with mass—rather than the bending of space—then it shouldn’t be able to pull on photons, which have no mass. The only way to explain how light’s path can be bent is if it’s the space itself that is bending.

In fact, the experience of being at a loss for an explanation is so rare and novel that we pay to feel it again; it’s what makes a magic show so much fun.

detailed mastery of our close surroundings; we can regularly fly four-hundred-ton airplanes across oceans, manage the quantum mechanics of billions of transistors in a computer chip, slice people open and insert bits from other bodies, and predict the mating habits of excited baboons. Truly, we live in an age of wonders.

We had a theory of evolution long before we knew about DNA, and we put a person on the moon long before we knew about the Higgs boson or many of the fundamental particles we know and love today.

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