We Just Don’t Know Yet

We Just Don’t Know Yet

I keep returning to this question like the five-year-old version of myself:
What’s inside the circle?

Every generation redraws the circle. Aristotle drew his with causes and substances. We redraw ours with dark matter, black holes, quantum fields, and information. The tools have changed beyond anything he could have imagined — telescopes that see to the edge of time, detectors that register single particles, equations that predict phenomena before we observe them.

And yet the centre remains curiously resistant.

That should tell us something.

Progress in knowledge does not necessarily mean approaching closure. Often it means learning exactly where closure refuses to occur. Aristotle would likely be astonished not by how much we know, but by how sharply defined the unknown has become.

In modern physics we speak of circles everywhere: feedback loops, reciprocity, entanglement, horizons. Causes blur into effects. Observation becomes participation. At the deepest levels, the universe seems less like a chain and more like a loop — self-consistent, self-referential, slightly restless, but not quite explainable in linear terms.

And when we ask, again, what is inside the circle? the honest answer may be: nothing we can isolate without breaking it.

This is not a failure of science. It is a sign of maturity. The space of ignorance has narrowed, but it has not disappeared. We no longer fill it hastily with myths or certainties. We let it stand, clearly outlined.

Perhaps future understanding will arrive — in new mathematics, new concepts, or a way of thinking we don’t yet possess. Aristotle could not have imagined quantum mechanics, but he would recognise the patience required to wait for it.

In my own thinking, I sometimes describe this deeper layer as meta-light — not light itself, but the relational structure that exists before anything can be transmitted or observed. It’s an attempt to name the idea that influence may precede illumination, that structure may exist before signals. I don’t offer it as an answer, only as a way of keeping the question alive without forcing it closed too early.

Which brings me to a word often placed at the centre: God.

Used carelessly, it stops thinking too early.
Used carefully, it functions like punctuation.

A full stop.

Not an explanation, not a mechanism, not a competing theory — but an acknowledgment that explanation has reached its natural limit for now. A way of saying: this is where language pauses.

So perhaps the most truthful statement we can make is the simplest:

We just don’t know yet.

And that is not emptiness. It is openness. It is the condition that keeps inquiry alive — from Aristotle’s time to ours, and onward into whatever future redraws the circle again.

For now, I’m content to leave the circle open — with a few pencilled notes in the margin, and the patience to see whether time fills them in.