Outer Limits

Everything you ever wanted to know about the unknown

Encyclopedias from Pliny's Historia naturalis of A.D. 77 to the contemporary Britannica have sought to distill the sum of human knowledge. Now British Playwright Ronald Duncan, 63, and Miranda Weston-Smith, 21, have tried a different approach. They have edited and just published The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance (Pergamon Press; $30), a 450-page volume that makes a brave attempt to encompass much of what man does not know. Say the editors: "Compared to the pond of knowledge, our ignorance remains atlantic."

To prove their point they enlisted 58 scientists to discuss what was unknown in their fields. The co-editors quickly discovered that "the more eminent they were, the more ready to run to us with their ignorance." Some of the contributors are indeed eminent: Molecular Biologists Francis Crick and Sir John Kendrew. Chemist Linus Pauling (all Nobel laureates), Anthropologist Donald Johanson, Astronomers Sir Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Physicist John Wheeler. The conundrums they pose are also notable. How did the universe come into being? Why do we sleep? How are galaxies formed? What is consciousness? Why does a species become extinct? The problem that the experts had simply in formulating these questions is perhaps best expressed by Mathematician C.J.S. Clarke: "It is far from clear just what it is we are ignorant of: despite millennia of attempts, no scientific language yet exists for turning one's vague feeling of mystery into sufficiently concrete questions."

Still, they tried. Writes Crick, who with James Watson won his Nobel Prize for elucidating the structure of DNA, the master molecule of life: "We understand how an organism can build molecules, although the largest of them is far too minute for us to see, even with a high-powered microscope; yet we do not understand how it builds a flower or a hand or an eye, all of which are plainly visible to us." Even less is known, Crick notes, about how an animal's nervous system is formed, how the growth of the nerves is directed and how they are hooked up.

Physiologists Henry Buchtel and Giovanni Berlucchi recall that a question asked in a classic 1950 history of experimental psychology--"Where or how does the brain store its memories? That is the great mystery"--is still unanswered a quarter of a century later. Psychologist Wilse Webb cheerfully admits that after years of research on sleep, he still does not understand its purpose.

Ignorance abounds in the physical sciences as well. Astronomer Douglas Gough points out that the inner structure, composition, and workings of the sun, let alone distant stars, remain a mystery and that even sunspots, which were recorded by the ancient Chinese, still defy understanding. Theoretical Physicist Abdus Salam concedes that science could fail in the search for a basic particle of matter, that probing deeper into the structure of matter may yield ever-more-basic particles.

Despite such candid admissions, an air of optimism seems to pervade the encyclopedia. The editors believe that "a decade hence many of the problems mentioned in these pages will have been solved." Zoologist H.S. Micklem states that most of "the missing pieces in the jigsaw" of immunology will soon be discovered. The other contributing scientists, too, appear to echo Coleridge's declaration that encyclopedias represent a faith in "the progress of the future."

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