Today’s Navigate the Chaos question is “How often do you remind yourself that the world is complex and many questions are left unanswered?”
People that navigate the chaos understand that the world is complex and some problems have either not be solved or not even been identified.
They realize that they do not know everything and, more importantly, they understand that no one could possible know everything. With that in mind, they realize just how complex the world is and continues to be. Vera Rubin developed her interest in astronomy as a young girl; her father helped her build a telescope and took her to meetings of amateur astronomers.
She was the only astronomy major to graduate from Vassar College in 1948, only to learn - when she applied to graduate school at Princeton - that women were not allowed in that university’s graduate astronomy program. She would eventually earn her doctorate from Georgetown, on whose faculty she later worked before joining the Carnegie Institution, a nonprofit scientific research center in Washington.
During her career, Rubin examined more than 200 galaxies, and observed that galaxies don’t quite rotate the way they were predicted. That lent support to the theory that some other force - “dark matter” - was at work. It was but one of her breakthrough discoveries.
In her 1997 book, “Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters,” Rubin wrote, “No one promised that we would live in the era that would unravel the mysteries of the cosmos. The edge of the universe is far beyond our grasp. Like Columbus, perhaps like the Vikings, we have peered into a new world and have seen that it is more mysterious and more complex than we had imagined. Still more mysteries of the universe remain hidden. Their discovery awaits the adventurous scientists of the future. I like it this way.”
How often do you remind yourself that the world is complex and many questions are left unanswered?