Opinion From science to fiction, stories of the uncertain and unknown
Why do we, the non-scientists, care about Dark Matter or quantum uncertainties, relativity and black holes? After all, to most laymen, the science behind the words may as well be magic
It is in this space that we can let our imaginations run wild. Like our ancestors with their mythologies, we make narratives to move from the little we know to all that we don’t. 
“Ninety per cent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.”—Terry Pratchett
There are, according to most estimates, around a million physicists in the world. A significant number of them, let’s be generous and say over half, are theoretical physicists, who truly understand the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, the Higgs boson particle and the Standard Model of particle physics. Fewer still know what to look for when they are looking for Dark Matter. Yet, a small portion of lay readers continue to be fascinated by these ideas. We read last week about what could be a breakthrough towards getting evidence of Dark Matter (colloquially, “the stuff that makes gravity work”), with the same bated breath as when, in 2012, the God Particle (Higgs boson) was finally detected by the Large Hadron Collider.
Why do we, the non-scientists, care about Dark Matter or quantum uncertainties, relativity and black holes? After all, to most laymen, the science behind the words may as well be magic. Lately, this asymmetry of knowledge has become a fault line not just among academics but in society and politics at large. During the pandemic, for example, “follow the science” became the US establishment’s rallying cry under Joe Biden, while the Trumpian opposition made the “science” itself suspect. Closer home, rationalists cite science to critique the often dangerous prescriptions by purveyors of “traditional” cures. Science and scientists are now subject to the same polarisation that so much else is. Yet, it is the knowledge asymmetry, the “magical” quality of fundamental research, the search for the unknown and uncertain, that lays the foundation for everything from thought experiments to science fiction.
It is in this space that we can let our imaginations run wild. Like our ancestors with their mythologies, we make narratives to move from the little we know to all that we don’t. From Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series, on the nature of machines, people and how societies decay to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which uses the idea of Dark Matter and multiverses to talk about consciousness and the oppressions of politics and religion that seek to control our creative impulses — the true Utopian tales come from writers who see the future as the broadening of the human potential. They are at the other end of the spectrum from figures like Plato or Orwell, who write of a future that is a polemical extension of the worst of the present.
There may be just a million physicists in the world. But Interstellar grossed around $770 million at the box office, and millions continue to watch it on OTT platforms. They include children who just like the stories of science. Some of them may grow up to illuminate Dark Matter.
The writer is Deputy Associate Editor, The Indian Express. aakash.joshi@expressindia.com
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