How Much Do We Really Know About the Universe?

[cmb]

Excluding what is unknowable, and stuff that is made up (stories, soap opera plot lines, stuff like that), how much do we know that is knowable.

This is a semi-serious philosophical question, I'm not after a scientifically referenced percentage just opinions and thoughts from the highly knowledgeable forum congregation here.

But, I mean, we seem to know a heck of a lot and discovered the inner ticking clock workings of the universe to a degree over the last century in particular.

How much more is there to go? Have we got a mostly complete picture, or just half way there, or we are ridiculously naïve and know so little that if we met a vastly more informed and intelligent extra terrestrial species they'd look upon our level of intelligent understanding like we would look upon a slug?

I think we're 'sort of half way there' but haven't quite got all the data in yet to join up the dots. I fear that some people (particularly at political levels) think science holds all the answers already.

 

[Hornbein]

How much is known is unknown.

 

[bob012345]

We seem to know a lot about the relationship of things and less about the absolute nature of things and given that our most advanced theories are pushing at the frontier of the unknowable already, I think as a society, we know a lot of what is actually knowable.

 

[256bits]

I think as a society, we know a lot of what is actually knowable.

Makes sense, we know what we know.
It also seems reasonable that we will never know what is unknowable.

 

[DaveE]

Doesn't this beg the question what is knowledge? What about Laplace's demon, for example. Not all knowledge is equally valuable to most of us. We all remember useless things that we would be happy to forget, for example.

This is why I'm not a fan of most philosophical questions, many ultimately boil down to definitions and semantics. Disagreements are usually the result of poorly defined questions.