Thought provoking, though most of my thoughts started with "but..." :-)
Cleaning dishes vs poetry may be an extendable analogy, so let's go that way first. There are always more dishes to be washed, but there are different techniques, different technologies, there's exchanging painted china for dishwasher safe china for recyclable paper and plastic and, who knows, perhaps in the future we'll have "forcefield" or "self-cleaning", or even "totally recyclable" plates where the dirty plates disappear into the table to have all organic matter recycled and the table passes the clean plates back into the plate store (or disintegrates them back into hoppers to make new plates for the next meal).
Poetry, as you say, you learn once ... and then have to refresh your memory or it disappears. Some people are very lucky and require very little refreshing (eidetic memory), others need to re-read it every year for it to stick well. But the *meaning* of the poetry and the effect can change as you change through life. You find new insights, it reveals something else about the human condition, or you learn that it is insipid and banal, or derivative of a poem that you hadn't heard of before. Your relationship to that poem can change.
Science is seeking for the "how" and "why" and attempting to understand what may well be the infinite. But things are learned along the way, many of which are of use to people in general (or specific). And that journey is the point of science, not reaching an end where everything is known, but finding out how the heart works (which can then lead to artificial hearts and save lives) or how dolphins communicate, or how the universe was formed, or how a bee flies ... there *is* a point and purpose to learning so very much, even if science is not completable. I will never understand another person completely, but there's still a point in learning more about other people.
no subject
Cleaning dishes vs poetry may be an extendable analogy, so let's go that way first.
There are always more dishes to be washed, but there are different techniques, different technologies, there's exchanging painted china for dishwasher safe china for recyclable paper and plastic and, who knows, perhaps in the future we'll have "forcefield" or "self-cleaning", or even "totally recyclable" plates where the dirty plates disappear into the table to have all organic matter recycled and the table passes the clean plates back into the plate store (or disintegrates them back into hoppers to make new plates for the next meal).
Poetry, as you say, you learn once ... and then have to refresh your memory or it disappears. Some people are very lucky and require very little refreshing (eidetic memory), others need to re-read it every year for it to stick well. But the *meaning* of the poetry and the effect can change as you change through life. You find new insights, it reveals something else about the human condition, or you learn that it is insipid and banal, or derivative of a poem that you hadn't heard of before. Your relationship to that poem can change.
Science is seeking for the "how" and "why" and attempting to understand what may well be the infinite. But things are learned along the way, many of which are of use to people in general (or specific). And that journey is the point of science, not reaching an end where everything is known, but finding out how the heart works (which can then lead to artificial hearts and save lives) or how dolphins communicate, or how the universe was formed, or how a bee flies ... there *is* a point and purpose to learning so very much, even if science is not completable. I will never understand another person completely, but there's still a point in learning more about other people.