I Don’t Know Any More

DAVID CASPER

When I was three or four years old, I started counting. Although words and names challenged me, numbers did not. I soon realized that there were really only ten numbers, and you could “stack” those numbers forever. My only limitation was knowing the words for the bunch of the numbers with the next three zeros that came after billion, trillion, and quadrillion, as they marched on to infinity.

In kindergarten, our teacher asked us to count as far as we could. I was scared. This assignment meant I would be there “forever.” I solved the problem by telling a little lie. When I got to the number 32, I said, “I don’t know any more.”

I ran into a similar problem years later, when I started to study space. I could easily see the sun, moon, and stars. They seemed right there. But after learning that they were so many lightyears away, I’d contemplate how monstrously large they must be for us to see them as that small. Then, when I tried to imagine what came past the stars, I became deeply perplexed, realizing I couldn’t name a value or a number that would limit space. It seemed that no one could really be able to tell us what is there beyond the stars because there is no “there” in the usual sense of the word. The “there” goes on to infinity, too. At this point I think we all tell ourselves little lies like I did in kindergarten, saying “I don’t know any more.”

It’s frightening to come to the limits of what we can count and measure. But the problem doesn’t stop there. We don’t even know how basic things like gravity actually work. It’s supposed to be the force that binds the universe together. We know what it does and how to measure it, but we can’t explain how it works. We seem for now to have come to the limits of understanding. Then there are even greater mysteries beyond. There seems to be something called “dark matter,” which we know must exist because it makes the calculations about the universe work. But we don’t even know how to ask all the questions about it, let alone explain what it is and how it functions. At least not yet.

Just as I knew that there must be something beyond what my mind can count, I know that something exists that is larger than the universe, and that makes this all work. When I jump and come back down to earth, something is working, whether or not I can explain it. Something went BANG to create the cosmos itself, with its gravity and dark matter and other mysteries that always seem to be there beyond the limits of what we can explain.

We know it exists, that number beyond which we can count and the “there” that lies beyond the stars, the thing that is more than we can see. This Something is there and it’s really big!