This is the kind of place where you’ll hear Lake Guns
The sound of a cannon booming over a smooth body of water… and there’s nothing to see. Nothing! You can hear the sound, but where’s it coming from?
Welcome to the wonderful world of “Lake Guns.”
These totally unexplained boomings occur over bodies of water all over the world, and have been noted and puzzled over for hundreds of years. Patty and I used to hear them over Barnegat Bay, on days when the water was calm and there wasn’t much of anything to hear… except a few gulls and the lake gun.
They don’t occur over every body of water and they don’t occur every day.
And nobody knows what they are.
“ Lord over all we know, and Lord over all we don’t know.”
Sheer brilliance, Lee. I can’t imagine a better, more accurate or more succinct way of describing this. Mankind’s knowledge has grown dramatically in recent centuries. The most humble among us carries with them knowledge that would have been unbelievable to people 1,000 years ago. Daniel even prophesied that knowledge would become abundant, and perhaps this is what he was talking about, but … with all of the things mankind has learned, we still don’t know a lot of things.
For example, gravity is fairly well understood, but no one knows how it works, or why it happens. It was suggested that there are gravitons involved, but no one really knows what a graviton is, it is hypothetical. What is really puzzling, is that gravity is action at a distance. In the past, some thought that it was an act of spirit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that is wrong. If I were a more cunning person, I could write a book proposing gravity gnomes and charge people to hear my theory. It’s all the same, because at the bottom of it all, no one actually knows how gravity works. The graviton solution is not without merit, but it is unproven.
There are limitations that human knowledge encounters which appear to be insurmountable. In the realm of the very small, it is impossible to go past a certain point. It is proposed that everything is made of incredibly tiny “strings”, but these would be smaller than the wavelength of light and this makes it impossible to ever actually see.
In the realm of the very large, the models of gravitational behavior would predict something different from what astronomers have observed. Galaxies would break apart and lose their observed shapes unless there was more matter than can be observed. They have proposed the existence of “dark matter”, to make up the deficit; dark, as in unobservable; radiating neither visible light, heat, nor any other form of radiation, but it’s presence is betrayed by gravity. Is dark matter real, or is the understanding of gravity incomplete? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.
The fact that the Universe is expanding is accepted by most in the science community, but the big question was; would the expansion continue infinitely, or would the Universe eventually collapse back upon itself? Advanced observational capability has suggested that the Universe is expanding faster than they had initially thought, so to account for these, “dark energy” has been proposed. No one knows what dark energy is, but it is required in order to explain what can be observed. It is worth noting that there are a number of references in scripture to God stretching out the heavens. Perhaps dark energy is actually an act of spirit.
Wave/particle duality of light is a well known phenomenon and can be observed by anyone with an old shoe box, some tape, a utility knife, a flashlight and a darkened room. This is actually quite fun. Light behaves as waves, and the interference patterns can be observed with the double slit experiment, which is where the shoebox comes in, but light also behaves like particles. So which is it, wave or particle?
The point to all of this is that we, as humans, have limits to our understanding, and it is becoming for us to humble acknowledge that fact. We don’t really have any way to probe beyond certain limits, with regard to the very small, the very large, and the behavior of visible light. There is nothing wrong with investigating such matters, and I believe that our searching such subjects can reinforce our faith in our awesome God.
Another interesting discourse. Too bad you weren’t among my high school science teachers. I might’ve learned something.
Thanks Lee. I try.
Never knew this – amazing.