"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -Socrates
The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the culmination of a certain old way of thinking, the sort of thinking that led each and every intellectual of any repute to conclude his life with an epic work that basically boiled down to "Absolutely Everything in My Specialty". The works got longer and longer as time passed. An obsession with minutia and the meticulous detail of such works began to resemble that urge six year olds sometimes get towards comprehensive cataloging. "I'm going to write down every person/number/word in the world". Less reflective children continue the exercise until they get bored, but certain children reach a sort of elementary school epiphany that there is always more to write down. They wouldn't necessarily put it so succinctly, but that's the gist of their conclusion.
Just about every field of human thought suffered from the same malaise by the early twentieth century.
Historians would dedicate decades to compiling comprehensive histories. Edward Gibbons finished off the eighteenth century with the immense six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a feat later topped by numerous historians embarking upon their own attempts to write comprehensive histories of absolutely everything. William and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization spanned eleven volumes and two million words. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History topped out at twelve volumes. If a work could just be long enough it could capture the essence of everything that happened in all of human history.
Writers churned out longer and longer novels throughout the nineteenth century, taking twenty pages to describe a man getting out of bed in the morning. Dickens and Tolstoy took years off their lives just lifting their manuscripts. If a novel could just be long enough, it might capture reality itself.
Physicists reveled in the pinball universe. Every atom a billiards ball bouncing around in perfect accordance with physical laws. If you could measure just so precisely, you could know the precise position and vector of every atom in the entire universe. You could predict through humble Newtonian physics every event in all of history, every thought that ever flitted through a human brain. You could see the future. If the measurements could just be precise enough, you could know everything that ever was and ever would be.
Mathematicians spent half a century on the monumental project of comprehensively defining and proving all mathematical axioms, fitting them into a grandiose universal set. With enough volumes, you could annotate and define every possible bit of logic and its relationship with all other conceivable logic.
Children see the flaw in this societal hubris: there is always more. A history could always be more complete, until a volume was written on every single person who ever lived. A novel could always be more real, until it was as voluminous as what the historians aimed to produce. There was always another atom to measure, another axiom that didn't quite fit the existing ones. We thought the map could be as perfect as the territory.
The twentieth century tore down all those notions, one after another. Gödel's incompleteness theorem destroyed the idea of comprehensive mathematics, proving not only the impossibility of completeness, but also that any system included axioms that were true but not provable. Einstein ripped down physics with relativity and the genesis of quantum mechanics: it's not simply that we do not know whether an electron is here or there until measured, it's that the electron is simultaneously in both places until we do. Schrödinger's cat. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Our ideas of history itself disintegrated in the world wars of absolutism and the birth of atomic fire. Science fiction and horror were born as nineteenth century novels died. Lovecraft and Wells wrote of a vast and incomprehensible universe that dwarfed everything in human experience a mere few decades after writers focused their microscopes on cataloging the minutia of human experience.
We cannot know everything, but realizing that is the first step to knowing something.
"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful--cannot lead to all truths." -Douglas Hofstadter
The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the culmination of a certain old way of thinking, the sort of thinking that led each and every intellectual of any repute to conclude his life with an epic work that basically boiled down to "Absolutely Everything in My Specialty". The works got longer and longer as time passed. An obsession with minutia and the meticulous detail of such works began to resemble that urge six year olds sometimes get towards comprehensive cataloging. "I'm going to write down every person/number/word in the world". Less reflective children continue the exercise until they get bored, but certain children reach a sort of elementary school epiphany that there is always more to write down. They wouldn't necessarily put it so succinctly, but that's the gist of their conclusion.
Just about every field of human thought suffered from the same malaise by the early twentieth century.
Historians would dedicate decades to compiling comprehensive histories. Edward Gibbons finished off the eighteenth century with the immense six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a feat later topped by numerous historians embarking upon their own attempts to write comprehensive histories of absolutely everything. William and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization spanned eleven volumes and two million words. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History topped out at twelve volumes. If a work could just be long enough it could capture the essence of everything that happened in all of human history.
Writers churned out longer and longer novels throughout the nineteenth century, taking twenty pages to describe a man getting out of bed in the morning. Dickens and Tolstoy took years off their lives just lifting their manuscripts. If a novel could just be long enough, it might capture reality itself.
Physicists reveled in the pinball universe. Every atom a billiards ball bouncing around in perfect accordance with physical laws. If you could measure just so precisely, you could know the precise position and vector of every atom in the entire universe. You could predict through humble Newtonian physics every event in all of history, every thought that ever flitted through a human brain. You could see the future. If the measurements could just be precise enough, you could know everything that ever was and ever would be.
Mathematicians spent half a century on the monumental project of comprehensively defining and proving all mathematical axioms, fitting them into a grandiose universal set. With enough volumes, you could annotate and define every possible bit of logic and its relationship with all other conceivable logic.
Children see the flaw in this societal hubris: there is always more. A history could always be more complete, until a volume was written on every single person who ever lived. A novel could always be more real, until it was as voluminous as what the historians aimed to produce. There was always another atom to measure, another axiom that didn't quite fit the existing ones. We thought the map could be as perfect as the territory.
The twentieth century tore down all those notions, one after another. Gödel's incompleteness theorem destroyed the idea of comprehensive mathematics, proving not only the impossibility of completeness, but also that any system included axioms that were true but not provable. Einstein ripped down physics with relativity and the genesis of quantum mechanics: it's not simply that we do not know whether an electron is here or there until measured, it's that the electron is simultaneously in both places until we do. Schrödinger's cat. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Our ideas of history itself disintegrated in the world wars of absolutism and the birth of atomic fire. Science fiction and horror were born as nineteenth century novels died. Lovecraft and Wells wrote of a vast and incomprehensible universe that dwarfed everything in human experience a mere few decades after writers focused their microscopes on cataloging the minutia of human experience.
We cannot know everything, but realizing that is the first step to knowing something.
"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful--cannot lead to all truths." -Douglas Hofstadter
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