Filler: So much we just don't know

Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

In the wake of Irene, one thing became clear: We know as much about how our world operates as puppies know about stock options.

Science and technology look and feel like forms of magic. We can't explain how our gadgets operate, and we certainly can't rebuild or replace them.

Once, every tribe had a shaman to explain the mysteries of the universe: "The sun rises because it's chasing the moon, which failed to pay off on a bet it lost. Objects fall because they're attached to invisible strings pulled by covetous elves. Thunder is the gods bowling, and lightning is what happens when they chest bump after a good shot and their bowling shirts get all static clingy."

Today, most families have a member to explain the world, sometimes the father, sometimes the daughter, sometimes Grandpa Joe. But all this faux knowledge collapsed like a soggy papier mâche giraffe when Irene was bearing down.

"Wise father, will my iPhone work if the power goes out?"

"Um . . . well, the phone signal should . . . the Internet service comes from the wireless router so . . . the texting could . . . you might be able to get service from the 3G."

"What, exactly, are these Gs, of which you say there are three?"

"That, uh, that stands for Gods Granting Google."

We are, even with power, in the dark. We can operate in our world because we have manuals that tell us how, but that's not the same as understanding any of it. If you whip up a batch of eye of newt and frog hearts and the fella you feed it to falls for you, you're glad, but you don't actually get it. That's pretty much how it feels when we get the router, laptop and printer to communicate wirelessly.

Our inability to understand the world around us has been almost, but not quite, perpetual. There was a fleeting time in which normal folks could comprehend, but it quickly came and went.

For most of human history, even the most knowledgeable people didn't know diddly. Anatomy, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, agriculture, you name it, they were wrong about it. They did know as much about God and romance as we do, but that's just because we still know nothing.

Then we started figuring a few things out. Gravity. The Earth's relation to the sun. Basic genetics. The elements.

And as the knowledge and innovation began to come, literacy also spread in the Western world. There was more to know, and more people capable of learning it.

It all came together with a period of perhaps 100 years, when most people in the United States could read, and lived in a world they could understand.

Many, in 1925, could learn the physics of the day, repair their own automobiles, explain how a telephone worked and plan a sensible rotation of crops. They knew how the investment vehicles of their time -- stocks and bonds -- operated. They knew how to fix the radio. They could even, given a morbid curiosity and a surplus of time, come to understand the federal budget.

That came and went. Where once there was little knowledge to be had, now there is so much, and of such a complex nature, that no one could have a very high percentage of it.

Car problems are diagnosed by computers. Even the bankers who peddle the most complex investment products can't evaluate them. Cutting-edge physics is understood by hardly anyone.

What will I tell my daughter when she asks how iPhones work? I'll just say there are demons in them, and we force them to communicate with each other for us, or return to Hades. After all, I can't use static electricity from the bowling shirts of the gods to explain every phenomenon.