Where facts stop persuading and identity takes over.
A friend of mine on Facebook—Kim Berry—is very smart. He’s also almost perfectly opposite of me politically. He’s MAGA. I’m… well, not. It’s not that we disagree fully on every issue, but at times, it feels like that.
We’ve known each other for over twenty years. He’s been through multiple marriages. I lost my wife Lisa, and I’m now in my second chapter with Melissa. Yet somehow, through all of that, through life and a cultural divide that feels wider every year, we still find ways to stay connected. Which is interesting. And strange. And, at times, frustrating for both of us. How can the other not see what seems so obvious?
Sometimes we retreat to common ground to take a break from the divide. I recently posted a short science piece about Planck time: the smallest slice of time our current physics can meaningfully describe. Kim replied with a perfectly honest reaction:
“What is the universe and time made of?? Way over my head.”
It was half curiosity, half humility, and a little humor. I replied in kind, explaining that spacetime is, quite literally, over everyone’s head right now: including the experts. That’s not a failure of science. It’s one of its most honest admissions.
A few days later, Kim commented on last week’s column on societal blindness and made a deeper point. In science, he said, there is often “one truth:” the Earth really does orbit the Sun. But in politics and society, truth feels far more elusive.
The same facts can seem to fracture into different realities: a kind of multiverse of truths.
Evidence is framed differently depending on who you trust.
I agree with that description, to a point. He’s not wrong about the experience many people have. The split between shared reality and personal belief is real. And inspired this column.
Planck Scale and the Edge of Exploration
Planck time matters because it marks a boundary—not in reality itself, but in our ability to describe reality. It represents the shortest interval of time our current physics can describe well. Beyond it, our equations stop agreeing with one another, and explanation gives way to uncertainty.
Importantly, Planck time wasn’t invented to sound impressive. It’s unavoidable. When physicists combine the three pillars of modern physics—quantum mechanics, relativity, and gravity—their fundamental constants intersect at a specific scale. That intersection defines Planck time. A realm where the math for our most successful theories no longer matches. The math breaks. Logic points to a need for clarification.
That’s what makes Planck time so interesting. It’s not the “first tick” of the universe, and it’s not necessarily the smallest possible slice of time. It’s the shortest duration our current tools can reliably describe.
Beyond that point, we can still speculate, hypothesize, and explore; but we can no longer explain.
This breakdown isn’t because nature becomes chaotic or meaningless at tiny scales. It’s because our models are incomplete. Each framework excels in its own domain. General relativity treats spacetime as smooth and continuous. Quantum physics treats reality as probabilistic and discrete. But when we try to zoom in to Planck-scale resolution, the math stops working.
And here’s the key insight: failure at the Planck scale isn’t collapse, it’s guidance. It marks where explanation must pause and a different mindset must take over. That discipline, the allowing of the unknown to define the edge of the known, is the political lesson too many refuse to learn.
From Physical to Human Limits
Returning to politics, planck time reminds me of Rumsfeld. One of his Rumsfeld-ism is this:
We know what we know, we know there are things we don’t know, and then there’s the stuff we don’t even know we don’t know.
Planck time marks where certainty stops. I think that parallel between Rumsfeld and Planck is interesting. That exchange–between politics and science–reminds us that there is a path to disagree sharply and still talk honestly.
Scientific Certainty and Worldview
One of the quiet strengths of science is its built-in humility. Uncertainty isn’t treated as failure; it’s treated as information.
In human affairs, certainty tends to harden precisely where evidence becomes complex, incomplete, or emotionally charged. Instead of labeling boundaries, we push past them. Instead of saying “let’s wait and see,” we substitute confidence for clarity. Over time, disagreement stops being about evidence and becomes about identity, loyalty, and worldview.
In my writing, I explore this under the idea of the Rational Pragmatist: someone who embraces common knowledge and shared evidence, while still accommodating personal beliefs, often tied to religion, politics, or identity.
As Kim put it simply,
“It depends on who you want to believe.”
That distinction matters. Some questions genuinely have a single empirical answer. Others involve complex systems, probabilistic causation, incomplete data, and long feedback loops. Once beliefs become embedded in a broader worldview—MAGA or non-MAGA, progressive or conservative—new evidence is no longer evaluated in isolation. It’s filtered. Not necessarily out of bad faith, but because evidence now threatens more than a claim; it threatens coherence, belonging, and most importantly, identity.
This is where the scientific mindset could help us most. Science doesn’t ask us to abandon our worldviews; it asks us to restrain them. In science, we lean into what we can observe even when it conflicts with expectation. In most other areas of life, we tend to do the opposite.
Communication Beyond Certainty
One of the most puzzling features of modern disagreement is that more evidence often makes persuasion harder, not easier. Facts are abundant. Data is accessible. Contradictions are visible. And yet positions don’t soften—they calcify.
The shift happens when explanatory models quietly become identities.
In human affairs, models are worldviews. Once that fusion occurs, evidence is no longer evaluated neutrally. It arrives as a challenge to identity. And challenges to identity trigger defense, not reflection.
And, worldviews are not optional. Everyone has one. They function like operating systems for the mind, shaping what we notice, how we interpret events, and which explanations feel plausible. But worldviews also have limits. When we mistake our worldview for reality itself, communication breaks down.
Stories Are a Human Thing
By the way, scientifically speaking, we don’t actually know where this kind of deep division originated. There’s little to no fossil record of arguments, beliefs, or stories. But while researching this week’s philosophy FAQ, I was reminded of something worth pausing on.
Human brain size didn’t grow slowly and steadily over millions of years. It accelerated over the last million years. Our brains began expanding rapidly, reaching near-modern volumes long before civilization. That growth was real, measurable, and one of the most striking patterns in human evolution.
Could human rapid brain growth have coevolved with speach, stories, and argument?
We can’t yet prove when full language emerged, but it’s increasingly plausible that long before writing, before art, and perhaps even before complex tools, humans may already have been talking, gesturing, singing, and persuading. Tools, fire, hunting, and diet all mattered, but none fully explain the speed and scale of the change. Perhaps our impulse to debate, persuade, and divide is simply part of our evolutionary human identity.
Where Honesty Begins
Planck time doesn’t tell us what reality is made of. It tells us where our descriptions stop working. Human communication needs the same kind of boundary awareness.
The lesson of Planck isn’t that truth is unreachable. It’s that truth requires discipline.
It requires knowing when evidence supports confidence—and when it demands restraint. The most trustworthy systems of knowledge aren’t the ones that claim to explain everything. They’re the ones that clearly mark what they cannot yet explain.
Let’s carry that mindset into our conversations, even imperfectly. We might communicate differently—not by surrendering our convictions, but by loosening their grip on our identities; not by abandoning truth, but by recognizing the difference between explanation and belief.
