The poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), a younger contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, gave memorable expression to the awe in which the great mathematician, physicist, and astronomer was held in his day.  In an epitaph written for the funerary monument to Newton in Westminster Abbey (but which, unfortunately, was never used), Pope declared that

“Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light.”

That may, however, not have been Newton’s own estimate of his achievement:  “I do not know what I may appear to the world,” Sir Isaac is said to have remarked not long before his death in 1727, “but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

The quotation may or may not be authentic.  But it’s certainly true.  “Our science is a drop,” said the great American philosopher and pioneer psychologist William James (1842-1910), “our ignorance a sea.”  Please note the use, again, of the ocean as a symbol for the vastness of what we humans don’t know.  But then again, maybe James didn’t really say that.  Opinion is divided on the question.

And, of course, science has made enormous strides forward since the days of William James.  Even more impressive have been the nearly three centuries of scientific progress in all fields—from physics to biology, from geology to astronomy and chemistry—that have followed upon the death of Newton.

So here’s yet another quotation, from the eminent American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008):  “We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance,” he indisputably wrote.  “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

You may have sensed something of an “ocean theme” here.  So let’s continue with it.  Are the oceans apt symbols for human ignorance? Are they even, in and of themselves, indicators that, despite the great scientific and technological progress that we have made since modern science began, we ought to remain humble about what we don’t know?  (I certainly should: I’ve contributed nothing at all to the forward march of scientific progress.  “Mankind” may able to land on the moon, but I can’t.  I would be hard pressed, personally, to create so much as a bottle rocket, to distinguish an oak tree from an elm, or to explain the workings of a ballpoint pen.)

In fact, oceans are a very apt representation of our vast ignorance.  They cover more than 70% of the surface of our planet, and it has been estimated that more than 80% of them remain largely unexplored.  In fact, it’s often said that we know more about the surface of the Moon and of Mars than we do about Earth’s ocean floor.  Seen from along the coast, oceans often seem lifeless and featureless.  But anybody who has experienced a whale cruise or a dolphin “safari” can testify that, just offshore, they’re teeming with life and activity.

I began to think about this column while sitting on the Hawaiian island of Maui, looking out over the part of the Pacific Ocean that stretches between the islands of Lana’i and Molokai’i and far beyond.  That view explains why my thoughts have turned in this direction.  But, frankly, I just had to get a mention of Hawaii in.  A tough job, as they say, but somebody had to do it.  However, please don’t envy me too much: By the time you read these words, I’ll returned back to the cold of winter on the Wasatch Front.

We went out looking for humpback whales while we were on Maui, and we found many.  This wasn’t particularly surprising: There are said to be about two thousand of them in the Maui Nui Basin at this season of the years.  Their numbers peak there between January and March; they come every year to breed, to give birth, and (being mammals) to nurse their young.  They’ve been doing so for as long as humans have been in the Hawaiian Islands to observe them; they seem to like Hawaii’s warm waters, which both lack natural predators and offer them good underwater visibility.

But the humpbacks will serve well enough to further illustrate the mysteries of the ocean.  We saw them breach.  They can weigh as much as 80,000 pounds.  Forty tons.  Why do they make those amazing leaps out of the water and into the air?  We don’t know.  We watched them slap the sea’s surface with their fifteen-foot pectoral fins, sometimes just once, sometimes with multiple slaps in a row.  (One, resting on the surface on its back, slapped with both fins.). Why do they do this?  We don’t know.  Maybe they’re sending some type of signal.  We listened to their noisy sounds with an underwater microphone.  What are they communicating?  We don’t know, but their songs are complex and continually changing.

And how did these whales discover the waters of Hawaii?  Each year, they travel roughly 3500 miles from the cold, nutrient-laden waters off the coast of Alaska, taking between six and eight weeks for the journey.  While here, since there are no nutrients for them, the adults fast while the infants nurse.   As she draws from her reserves of fat to produce the highly nutritious milk needed for her calf’s rapid growth, a nursing female humpback can lose as much as a third of her body weight. Then, their mission here accomplished, the mature humpbacks and their newborn calves return northward.  For the adults, the roundtrip journey runs about six to seven thousand miles, requiring as much as four months altogether.

How did they master the route, which is considerably longer than the driving distance between Los Angeles and New York City and which lacks a regular network of interstate highways?  How do they navigate?  What “maps” do they use?  We don’t know.  And how do they teach the route to their young, who only stay with their mothers for a year before going independent?  Again, we don’t know.

But the journey regularly undertaken by humpback whales is nowhere near the longest migration known.  Earth’s longest annual migration is that of the arctic tern, a bird that typically weighs between three and five ounces (86-127 grams), and that averages about thirteen to fourteen inches (33–36 centimeters) from the tip of its beak to the tip of its tail.  Arctic terns travel every year between the Arctic and the Antarctic, covering an astonishing roundtrip distance of over 44,000 miles, or approximately 71,000 kilometers.  (The maximum migration tracked for an arctic tern thus far came in at 50,700 miles, or 81,600 kilometers.)

But why do arctic terns migrate such long distances?  They’re evidently in quest of (arctic) summer sun.  But, unlike humpback whales, they need to eat continually.  So they don’t simply fly in a straight line: In fact, they’ve been known to fly thousands of miles out of their way—and to every continent—in quest of the best weather and in pursuit of the best sources of food.  Again, how did they—how do they—learn to do this?  What maps do they follow?  We don’t really know.

But let’s get back to Maui.  (Indeed, let’s!)  The largest portion of the island (roughly 75% of it) is formed by the enormous shield volcano known as Haleakala, which rises to more than ten thousand feet above sea level.  Although it has erupted roughly ten times in the past thousand years and at least once during the last four to six centuries, the volcano is currently dormant.  But that doesn’t even remotely mean that Haleakala is extinct.  Even a dormancy period of six centuries—starting back before Columbus and before the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople—is nothing, a mere blink of the eye—in geological terms.  Haleakala is sleeping, but it remains active.  And, although scientists have ideas, and although volcanology has made enormous strides over the past decades, we can’t predict when Haleakala might come to life again.  We still have only sketchy ideas of what goes on just below Earth’s surface.  Metaphorically, we live on the surface skin of an onion.

For example, there is now reason to believe that primordial helium or helium-3, which was formed almost instantly after the Big Bang that apparently brought our universe into being, is trapped deep within the earth.  Perhaps even, as very recent research suggests, in the planet’s core.

But how can we know this?  In a sense, Earth’s core, and even its upper mantle, are even more distant from us than are remote galaxies; we will almost certainly never be able to observe them directly.  Owing to pressure and its own radioactive decay, the temperature of our planet’s core is estimated to be around 10,800 degrees Fahrenheit or 6,000 degrees Celsius, roughly comparable to the surface of the sun.  And temperatures rise very quickly underground:  Already, in the gold mine at Mponeng, South Africa—which, although it is the world’s deepest, is a mere pinprick at 2.5 miles—temperatures can reach as high as 150°F.

As noted, we live on the surface skin of an onion.  But we can make informed guesses from our limited vantage point.  We’ve learned, for instance, that, when volcanos erupt, small amounts of helium-3 occur in the gases that they belch forth from deep underground.  Scientists infer that it is primordial helium, captured billions of years ago from the nebula of gas and dust out of which our planet and our solar system were formed.

Earth’s inner core is thought to be a solid ball-shaped mass of iron and nickel.  It spins independently from the liquid outer core and from the rest of the planet.  This motion produces a magnetic field that prevents life from burning up under radiation from the Sun.  Without that motion, Earth would die.  It would resemble Mars, which became barren when it lost its magnetic field billions of years ago.  Recent research suggests, though, that Earth’s core may have changed its shape at least slightly within the past couple of decades.  Why?  Who knows?

Impressive as it indisputably is, our science is indeed a drop and our ignorance remains a sea.  There is abundant reason, even amidst our advanced technology, for viewing the cosmos around us with wonder and humility.  The scriptures support such an attitude:

“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.

“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”  (Genesis 1:20-21)

“When I consider thy heavens,” sang the Psalmist, “the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?”  (Psalm 8:3-4)

“Caught up into an exceedingly high mountain,” Moses saw God face to face and received a vision of the works of God, of  “the world and the ends thereof.”  Overwhelmed, he fell to the earth “for the space of many hours.”  When he recovered, he exclaimed, “Now. . . I know that man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed.”  (See Moses 1:1-10.)

Or, to put it in another, more positive, way:

“Oh Lord, my God
When I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee:
How great Thou art, how great Thou art”

**

In 2019, I published two articles in the “Deseret News” regarding the narrow band of Earth’s surface and atmosphere in which we can survive unaided and do most science: See “The miracle of Earth’s atmosphere design and the air we breathe” (https://www.deseret.com/2019/11/14/20959872/daniel-peterson-the-miracle-of-earths-atmosphere-design-and-the-air-we-breathe/) and “Gratitude for the dirt beneath our feet” (https://www.deseret.com/2019/11/28/20981961/daniel-peterson-gratitude-for-the-dirt-beneath-our-feet/).

I can’t close, though, without mentioning a marvelous rejoinder to Pope’s couplet about Newton that I cited at the beginning of this column.  Sir John Collings Squire (1884-1958) wrote it after Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity had disclosed a reality even deeper (and considerably weirder) than Newton saw:

“It did not last: the devil, shouting ‘Ho.
Let Einstein be’ restored the status quo.”

After the seemingly straightforward clarity of classical physics, the universe became, in some ways, as surprising and mysterious as ever.