Many educators, scholars, and gurus of all stripes have tried to shed light on how we acquire knowledge, and the importance of doing so. It is a subject that is subsumed by cultures, nations, educators, and ideologues of all persuasions. My own experience with these subjects began in a very informal way with my first grade teacher. I was smitten by her beauty, her poise, and her great looks. One day right after she had told the entire class to be quiet, I continued to talk with a special girl at the desk next to mine. I was ordered to come forward by the teacher of my dreams. I pretended to barely feel the five hard whacks of a paddle she administered across by butt cheeks. She nevertheless fell from grace in my book of potential lovers at some future time. Later, my fourth grade teacher cautioned a member of our class to “believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.” I instantly heard the wisdom in that caution knowing something about the limited skills of both her peers and her students. Much later, Neil deGrasse Tyson told a television audience of the limited usefulness of “eye witnesses” to almost anything. Better to trust scientific instruments than the observational skills of passersby, he told us, despite the heavy reliance placed on them by courts of law.

So are we all blind as bats? Nearly so, it seems. We see, but we do not observe, record, and verify the information coming to us via our eyes. How then, can we ever reach the truth about anything? In fact, we cannot. We can only describe something with approximate accuracy, tentative reliability, and with limited usefulness. Even then, we must circumscribe our conclusions with the numerical degree of probability that we could be wrong. And if there is more than one source, then we must square each numerical observation, sum them, and take the square root of them to reach an approximation of the total errors that are confounding our observational skills.

Is there anything more? Actually, there is. If we find our final answer along a continuum, it should lie somewhere in the upper quadrant between ignorance and enlightenment. And that is about as good as we can do. Truth is not even on the continuum.

Science creeps along in tiny steps. Back in 1962, the philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, instructed us that it requires many tests and observations from investigators hither and yon before we as a society can proclaim that we have advanced from an old to a new way of thinking about a given subject. He called such an event a “paradigm shift.” Students are still using that oddly accurate but ill-defined phrase to let others know that the money being spent on their education has not been entirely wasted.

In a prior life I was proud to present myself to the world as a metrologist, an adherent to the science of measurement. The measurements at issue were length, mass, time, temperature, luminescence, and amount of substance—plus 500 or so derivative measurements. It was all in the interest of bringing  weapons of mass destruction to bear on the issues that our adversaries refused to accept. The outcome was annihilation, or mutually assured destruction (MAD). I wasn’t entirely certain that these quantities circumscribed everything in the universe, but they were useful in their day.

In recent years I learned that the universe consisted of 94 percent dark matter and dark energy. We can not see them, or touch them, of smell them, or taste or hear them. But  they are there, nonetheless. What is more, astrophysicists inform us that the universe is expanding at a speed that exceeds the speed of light, and the heretofore gaps are filled with the dark stuff. Everything within the universe is still bound by the limitations of light, but the outer unknown boundaries are moving so fast that we can never reach them. So now my skills have been outdated by at least 94 percent of theoretical stuff, and further circumscribed by Clint Eastwood. Long ago he told us “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Do witnesses still place one hand on the Bible and swear to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God?” If they do, they are lying. Truth is a contradiction in terms of science, and God is a concept with no discernible parameters. Perhaps it is time to change that oath to this: “Do you affirm that your answers to all questions will verifiably attain the upper quartile along the continuum between ignorance and enlightenment, and that a creator who can surpass the speed of a universe that is expanding beyond the limits of all mortals, will smile approvingly on your responses? If so, you are qualified to take the witness stand and lie your ass off. But, jurors are cautioned to not believe one word that they hear from you. Now, bring in the guilty person charged with a crime against us, and let’s give him a fair trial.”