If you’d walked up to someone in the 14th century and told them, “Listen, friend, there are things we just can’t understand,” they probably would’ve shrugged, crossed themselves, and gone back to plowing dirt or something.

Mystery was part of the furniture back then — like goats or the Church. Of course there were unknowables. That was the point of existence.

Fast-forward to today, where humanity struts around like a caffeinated god with a particle accelerator. After four centuries of scientific conquest, we’ve convinced ourselves that everything is solvable — that the universe is just an especially tricky crossword puzzle, and one day we’ll fill in the last empty square and stand up, triumphant, whispering, We did it. We understood reality. Your move, cosmos.

It’s a beautiful dream. It’s also a little insane.

Because confidence, glorious as it feels on a TED stage, is not the same thing as certainty. Mathematics — that cold, brilliant kingdom — has the decency to prove its limits. Gödel told the mathematicians, Relax, you will never finish the job. There will always be truths you can’t touch.

Physics, on the other hand, never signed such a treaty. So we charge forward. We bang our heads against the unknown, sometimes for centuries, because we don’t know what we can’t know. That stubborn optimism — half discipline, half cosmic drunkenness — is science.

But here’s a small trick: whenever you wonder whether a question belongs to us or to the gods or to whatever lurks behind the last decimal place, ask yourself — Can we experiment on it? Can we, even in imagination, build a device to poke it?

If yes, then we’re still in the game.
We can test cancer.
We can tease consciousness.
We can drop molecules into quantum weirdness and see what happens.

We can even imagine standing on the newborn Earth, clipboard in hand, watching life ooze into being.

But then you get to the beginning of the universe, and suddenly the lab burns down. There's no experiment to build, no control trial, not even a good hallucination of one. The word experiment starts wheezing, loses meaning, and collapses.

And when experiment dies, science finds a cliff edge.

Of course, some brave souls sprint past that edge “in the name of science.” They build theories so speculative they start sounding like religious pamphlets stapled to differential equations. The irony is almost funny: in trying to transcend limits, they sometimes wander out of science and into performance art.

Consider our particle accelerators. We cook up temperatures like the universe’s first microseconds — trillions of degrees — and yet no baby universes pop out by accident.

We do not create fresh Big Bangs in broom closets.
We do not wake up as cosmic obstetricians wondering where to put the newborn cosmos.

Even if we one day sculpt spacetime itself and crank the temperature to “primordial soup, extra spicy,” there's still no guarantee anything universe-shaped will appear.

If we can’t even assemble life by dumping the right ingredients in a jar and shaking — and trust me, we’ve tried — why assume the universe arrives on demand like a cosmic vending machine?

This isn’t an argument for gods or ghosts. Invoking a deity just trades one hubris for another.

This is an argument for two simple things: Humility before nature’s absurd magnificence and Respect for the limits of reductionism — a tool, not a throne

Newton felt it, long before we built lasers or lost our sense of scale:

And here we are — still barefoot on that same shore, pockets full of interesting shells, telescopes and supercolliders slung over our shoulders, staring at the roaring ocean we will never fully cross.

Not because we failed, but because some mysteries aren’t obstacles.
They’re invitations.
They’re the reason the universe is worth looking at in the first place.