As awareness of the unknown is often more important than knowledge, and questions have often been more valuable than answers, the aim of this website is to record the unknown, take stock of the ignorance of the day and prompt its study.
The Unknown God had his temple in Athens, and Athenians could swear on his name, until metamorphoses of Akhenaton’s unique god pervaded and corrupted the thought of the world, forbidding for centuries the exploration of the unknown by imposing the certainties of consensus. But faith in static, final knowledge is the tomb of thought, a construct of hubris ignoring the reality of everlasting ignorance, and the ancient sage’s conviction that “the one thing I know is that I know nothing”1>. For knowledge is fickle, and what once seemed to be certain becomes deceptive, whereas irrational reality turns out to be factual logic. Doubt, not certainty, should grow with knowledge2.
Today’s science, similar to yesterday’s religion, seems to leave no misgivings that knowledge of everything is within reach, and progress made in the past hundred years only but increased doubts as to the existence of limits of the knowable. And yet, compared to the present island of knowledge, our ignorance remains Atlantic, the horizon of the unknown only receding as we approach it, and Francis Bacon’s idea of the “empire of man”, where everything will be known and understood, seems but an illusion.
Contrary to conventional encyclopedias, inventories of the known, Agnostopedia is an attempt to record what escapes or lies in the edge and beyond present knowledge, to stimulate inquisitive thought, and debunk unwarranted beliefs by introducing rational doubt. Scavenging in the sea of the unknown should generate questions that have not been foreseen. For there will always be more things unknown than known, even knowable for the sapiens’ brain, despite the belief that the end of the uncertainty of the unknown is in view. For the sake of rationality, doubt should always battle certainties. Thus, it would be valuable if scientists, prompted by seemingly naïve questions, belabor, admit and share their lack of knowledge, dispelling flawed certainties and misunderstandings that often result in misconceptions and religious nonsense, in the same way they share their knowledge and hard data.
The site will publish Questions Seeking Answers, Replies and Comments, Suggestions and Hypotheses. Those who know, or believe that they know, are invited to share their knowledge with those who dare to expose their doubts and ignorance. It is open to everyone, from the experienced scientist, with a vast amount of information within his discipline, to the young high school pupil with insatiable curiosity, limited knowledge, and an open mind allowing for “silly” questions. Candidly admitting lack of knowledge is the privilege of the wise, usually fairly old, and that of the young. For opposite reasons, both are ready to freely admit their ignorance. There is a “need for researchers to deactivate the thought patterns that they have installed in their brains and taken for granted for so many years”3. A need not only for scientists.
It should also contribute to stalk the unknown unknown, that which we ignore that we ignore, and help to explore the reasons of our inability to grasp that ignorance. However, questions likely to receive answers should be distinguished from nonsensical, those which can’t receive one, often resembling religious nonsense. They lie outside the scope of this site and may be used to illustrate the contortions of human thought in its desperate search for meaning. The purpose of the universe and the destiny of human species are examples of such questioning.
Because of the constraints in today’s science, “negative results”, i.e. data from experiments failing to produce answers to the initial quest, although often stemming from carefully planned and painstaking protocols, remain unpublished and frequently forgotten, the site is open to Short Communications describing such “negative results” that lack significance for the original observer; also to “incomplete observations”, those whose data haven’t reached a sufficient degree of confidence to satisfy the criteria of a peer review journal, but which contain enough information to help investigators to get started, perhaps in a different direction, even to induce a speculative leap. Speculative hypotheses and intellectual gambles are particularly welcome. A prize should be created for predictions of the foreseeable future.
Sometimes, the answer to a question is shocking, incredible, spontaneously rejected, and often ignorance is preferred to an incredible and disturbing reality, to what is supposed to be impossible, outside the boundaries of the logic imposed by the zeitgeist of commonsense. Contributions for creating a compilation of outstanding, once implausible ideas are invited in “The Incredible” section. They should help acceptance of tomorrow’s reality, vindicating the contention of the philosopher that “everything flows, nothing stands still”4.
Since admitting ignorance is not yet a criterion of wisdom, and doubt is still considered inferior to knowledge 5, contributors are offered the choice to protect their anonymity for all entries.
The Founder
A perpetual ignoramus, rerum novarum cupidus
1 ἕν οἶδα ὅτι οὐδὲν οἶδα. Socrates
2 Doubt grows with knowledge. Goethe
3 Shinichi Mochizuki
4 Τὰ πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει. Heraclitus
5 Le doute n'est pas au-dessous du savoir, mais au-dessus. Alain