Lawrence Krauss on Caveman Common Sense

We evolved as human beings a few million years ago on the Savanna in Africa, and we evolved to escape tigers, or lions, or predators. And so what makes common sense to us is the world on our scale. You know, how to throw a rock or a spear or how to find a cave. We didn’t evolve to understand quantum mechanics.

And, therefore, it’s not too surprising that on scales vastly different than the kind of experience we had as we were evolving as a species, that nature seems strange and sometimes almost unfathomable; it certainly violates our common sense. Our sense of what is common sense and what's intuition. But as I like to say, the universe doesn't care about our common sense.

We have to force our ideas to conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around. And if reality seems strange, that’s okay. In fact, that’s what makes science so wonderful; it expands our minds because it forces us to accept possibilities which, in advance, we may never have thought was possible.

I've said that scientists love mysteries, and we do. That’s the reason I'm a scientist. Because it’s the puzzles of the universe that make it so exciting. Now it is true that we want to solve, resolve those and solve those puzzles. That’s part of the fun of doing science: solving puzzles, basically.

But each time we do, new questions arise. And I think for many of us, just as in our lives, the searching is often much more profound than the finding. It’s the searching for answers through life in some sense that makes life worth living. If we had all the answers, we could just sit back and stare at our navels.

And I think what makes the search so exciting is that the answers are so surprising. The universe continues to surprise us in ways we never would have imagined; well beyond our own imagination in advance. That’s all we have to keep exploring the universe. We can't just sit in a room and think about it because every time we open a new window on the universe, we're surprised.

And that makes the whole process incredibly exciting.