Excerpt
What explains our obsession with the hidden?
Whence comes our enduring belief that truth is not to be found by means of immediate perception but through extreme efforts at augmenting what can be sensed with manufactured instruments? It is as if every scientific project were a crime scene, the perpetrators long since fled, leaving a few clumsy crumbs of evidence for researchers to puzzle over with magnifying lens and graphite powder.
From classical antiquity and its obsession with geometric order beyond manifest reality, followed by the late Renaissance conviction that everything in nature expresses an unfathomable divine intention, on through to the modern age with its instruments required to reveal the elemental nature of reality (microscopes, telescopes, particle colliders, mass spectrometers), what is causally primary is always thought to be buried deep beneath the surface of the obvious.
Traditionally things can be hidden in two fundamentally different ways. Things can be hidden in space, and they can be hidden in time.
To hide in space means that phenomena lie beyond the scope of our everyday senses because they are either too small or too distant to be detected without amplification. Things can be hidden in time by being too fast for us to perceive or too slow for a single lifetime to encompass.
And, given our extraordinarily bandwidth-limited cognition and the fleeting nature of an individual life, it comes as no surprise that by far the majority of natural phenomena would be hidden.