" An attainable goal is worth striving for, even if you can't attain it yourself. An unattainable goal is not."
I am reasonably convinced (but have not tried to mathematically prove/disprove) that there will always be more left to learn, in science, even if it comes down to counting turtles[*].
But if the goal is, "I want to understand as much as I can about X," or "I want to help all of understand as much as we can about the universe," then the goal is by definition possible: it's to find out just how much "as much as we can" is.
Note that (in the case of "we") it is never completable[**], but for each generation, that generation's version of it is attainable -- do our best, keep probing, and find out how much we can understand in our span.
[*] Recasting "what came before the Big Bang ... okay, what was the origin of that ... fine, what caused that?" as a "turtles all the way down" for the moment, even if it turns out not to be.
[**] Unless of course you are right and I am wrong about total knowledge being finite.
Hmm. How is knowledge about the universe stored? At some point, don't we run out of electrons with which to store the data about (among other things) the states of the electrons ... thus making the universe itself our only complete representation of the universe, with no entity within it able to know everything about it?
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 08:56 pm (UTC)I am reasonably convinced (but have not tried to mathematically prove/disprove) that there will always be more left to learn, in science, even if it comes down to counting turtles[*].
But if the goal is, "I want to understand as much as I can about X," or "I want to help all of understand as much as we can about the universe," then the goal is by definition possible: it's to find out just how much "as much as we can" is.
Note that (in the case of "we") it is never completable[**], but for each generation, that generation's version of it is attainable -- do our best, keep probing, and find out how much we can understand in our span.
[*] Recasting "what came before the Big Bang ... okay, what was the origin of that ... fine, what caused that?" as a "turtles all the way down" for the moment, even if it turns out not to be.
[**] Unless of course you are right and I am wrong about total knowledge being finite.
Hmm. How is knowledge about the universe stored? At some point, don't we run out of electrons with which to store the data about (among other things) the states of the electrons ... thus making the universe itself our only complete representation of the universe, with no entity within it able to know everything about it?