What stays open
Some fear that every new piece of knowledge makes the world narrower: more explained, more disenchanted. Looked at closely, the opposite has happened. This page sorts out what is measured, what is interpreted and what is open — for the head that stays awake.
The mystery grows
A good hundred years ago, some considered physics almost finished; only two small clouds stood on the horizon. One became quantum physics, the other the theory of relativity — the two greatest upheavals in how we think about the world. And today cosmology says: of everything that fills the universe, we know about five percent. The rest — dark matter, dark energy — carries names, but no face. That is measured, not invented: the closer we look, the larger the unknown has become.
The sentence “basically we already know everything” has been wrong in every century so far.
A connectedness distance does not dissolve
Two particles of light from the same source remain a single whole even as they fly off in opposite directions — tested across borders, by now across more than a thousand kilometres between a satellite and the earth. Erwin Schrödinger gave it a name — entanglement — and called it the characteristic trait of the new physics. These measurements earned the Nobel Prize in 2022; they stand beyond doubt.
Two things belong to this. First: messages cannot be sent this way — whoever promises you telepathy by physics promises too much. Second, and this is the real point: the world cannot be fully taken apart into separate pieces. Being separate is not its last word. What that means for us is open.
The future is written nowhere
At the smallest scale, nature throws dice: when exactly an atomic nucleus decays has no hidden cause that physics knows of — and it has searched thoroughly. Most physicists read this as true chance; there are also interpretations in which, hidden away, everything is fixed after all. That remains a reading, not a proof. But the old picture of a clockwork merely running down has lost its self-evidence: as far as we know, the future is not a finished book.
A common beginning
Everything that exists has the same origin — a beginning from which space, time and matter emerged. And closer than you’d think: the heavy building blocks of your body were made inside stars; the iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones was once star-glow. That is measured. You are — literally, not as a figure of speech — related to everything you see.
And the fine threads from the earliest time? In the equations of quantum physics, entanglement does not tear — it only weaves on: whatever has once touched links up with everything it meets from then on, until no single thread can be followed any more. Not vanished — only no longer readable. Whether the early wovenness still shows somewhere, say in the oldest light of the sky, is an open research question — mainstream early cosmology even reads the patterns of the galaxies as the magnified quantum flicker of the beginning. And even “empty” space, looked at closely, is neither empty nor unconnected. Much remains open here. But the burden of proof has changed sides: being interwoven is no longer the bold assumption in today’s physics. Being entirely separate would be the bolder one.
Time, and what has been
Relativity knows no privileged now: what counts as “simultaneous” depends on the standpoint. A natural reading of this: all moments are equally real — the past is not gone, it merely lies elsewhere in time, the way a town behind you does not cease to exist as you drive on. When Albert Einstein lost his old friend, he wrote to the family that the separation of past, present and future is “only a stubbornly persistent illusion”. A few weeks later he died himself. That is an image, not a proof — the experts argue to this day. But it is an image from the very middle of physics: that your days pass may not mean that they are lost.
Experience itself
The greatest riddle lies nearest: how does it come about that it feels like something to be you? Physics describes, of everything, how it behaves — from outside. What something is from inside stands in no equation. To this day nobody has even begun to explain how experience arises from matter — not for lack of diligence, but because here the method itself reaches its end. Some conclude: experience belongs to the basic ingredients of the world, as fundamental as energy. Nobody can prove that, nobody can disprove it — an open door, not a doctrine. Only one thing is fully certain, and it is the only thing that is: that you experience. Everything else you know through this one window.
And God?
For some, this open room has a name; for others it stays namelessly wide. Physics does not decide that — it never was its office. But one thing it has done reliably for a hundred years: it holds the door open. Whoever believes need not fear it; whoever doesn’t loses none of its wonder. The room has grown larger with every decade, not smaller.
Keeping apart what is known, what is suspected and what is open does not make the world colder — it makes it wider. A fully explained world would have no room left for wonder; this one has more of it than ever. And wonder is no luxury: whoever wonders is, in that moment, not circling around themselves. Sometimes that is exactly the relief.
And when the head has had enough: The breath is there
The quieter sister of this page: For the night