I did a minor in neuro and had a very similar experience. Fascinating and useful but it was always slightly alarming when the professor would answer a question with "I don't know.. no one knows. That is far beyond the limits of our capabilities to know." A reminder that scientists really do work at the edge of ignorance!
That to me is really how we need to be emphasizing education in science for young people.
We tend to give the impression that we’ve figured almost everything out, and so you’re just learning the facts of it all.
Really, we’ve carved out a little island in a sea of ignorance, and the foundations of the island are just our current best rough approximations that might collapse.
An example from the field I’m in — biology. It’s quite likely that if you worked at it you can describe a new species in your backyard. You don’t have to go to the Amazon rainforest, there’s scientific unknowns all around you all the time.
This doesn’t seem to be true at least for the nervous and immune systems. Probably also the microbiome we host. There’s lots of important stuff yet to be learned with those systems.
I read the parent's comment in terms of how we once viewed life being mysterious, talking about the "elan vital" before we understood DNA. This is often used as an analogy to our current struggle to understand consciousness.
My above comment was not ironic. What I meant is that we have already discovered the algorithm that gives rise to all biological phenomena: Evolution by Natural Selection.
We also have some grand principles that further unite the field, like the cell as the basic unit of organismal life, emergent properties of higher order systems, &c.
The remaining work is mostly 'stamp collecting' - looking at the details of the output of that algorithm. Of course those details are enormously complex. Kind of like mapping out the Mandlebrot Set after you already know the algorithm.
If you wanna cure cancer, resolve chronic diseases, conserve ecosystems under climate change, etc.
It’s cool to know that DNA exists and that life evolves by natural selection, but getting into the complex weeds of that fractal is where we discover that we know so little.
