Will We Ever Know Everything?

There are just two major places from which to look: The Physical Sciences and the Philosophical and Spiritual realm.

In February, 2006, almost a decade ago, Scientific American published a special edition on scientific frontiers – topics, theories and questions – that were yet to be resolved, answered, or settled.  I kept a copy and today, some were answered but a lot more still remain as frontiers.  According to Moore’s Law, computational power doubles every two years.  Surely, by the end of the century we will have had enough in computing power, technological advances in new measuring tools and theories to finally know everything.  But something tells me, “Not so fast, old man.”

What has propelled our development as a species is our ability to collectively learn and more significantly to become adept at passing on what we learn from generation to generation with logarithmic multiplying effect.  From the discovery of the many ways fire can be harnessed to the invention of the wheel to gun powder and so on and on, we expect that we are equipped with almost limitless ability to forever expand our knowledge.  To know everything seems like something just barely over the horizon.

In the sciences empirical evidence is obviously the source for answers.  Philosophy and religion begins where the sciences end. But that has not been the case in the beginning. Philosophy and religion, in fact, preceded the sciences for far longer time than the latter had existed. We can even say that science came about because of the questions asked by philosophers early in history.  Science too became an arbiter between what people believed to be true or assumed to be the truth and the charlatans, magicians, and the superstitious. Chemistry is the child of alchemy, in fact. Science, philosophy and religion are believed by most to be seeking the same answers from three different points of view and via different processes. Meanwhile, religion is under assault, secularism is on the rise, and a philosophy degree is considered one of those very low on job prospects.

Science asks, makes conjectures, it does test after test repeatedly before concluding.  Religion and Philosophy can be somewhat interchangeable if not supportive of each other but both counterbalances the sciences.  What the sciences lack in assessing morality the latter grapples with those that cannot be tested in test tubes or with instruments but by the way we live our lives. Where the sciences say, “we don’t know”, the latter offer what is possible given a set of suppositions testable only by either logic or belief and faith.

Today, a high school senior with a B+ average in math and physics knows more about the subject than Isaac Newton ever did.  We know more about relativity theories than Einstein when he was alive.  The operative word is “know” and not necessarily “understanding”.  Einstein died knowing only one element of his General Relativity Theory and one of Special Relativity that were proven to be true.  Measuring instruments have not yet been invented then to test the other elements but in less than a century much have been proven to be correct, including perhaps what he thought he had gotten wrong but it turned out he was right all along.  And there was one field proposed by others that he could not get himself to believe or agree with – Quantum Mechanics - that had since been proven and he was wrong.  However, and this is very significant, and it is the reason he was recognized Person of the 20^th Century by Time magazine because his ideas had the most impact in human history.

Old Albert’s contribution is the one I look at because, contrary to popular belief, his theories were not stand alone or new concepts, but were built upon from previous works by other folks before him or contemporarily with others.  It was his so called thought experiments that put it all together. And that was where his genius came from.  He was not even strong in mathematics and needed help to get his thoughts the mathematical structure.  This is a good example of knowledge building on another, ad infinitum, but will it really go on?  For one thing the new knowledge he brought up overturned a few of Isaac Newton’s concepts that stood for over two centuries.  Einstein was known to have apologized as he stood in front of Newton’s statue at Cambridge University, England.

Albert was the man all right but two women, relatively unknown to the general public, made significant contributions in their own right to deserve a mention here.  And I promise to quote only one three-lettered formula, E=mc².

Emilie du Chatelet was born in 1706, died at age 42, and would have lived in obscurity as an aristocrat’s wife, albeit with a checkered romantic life, if not for her other ardent love - science.  As a side note, Voltaire, himself an intellectual giant and one of several of du Chatelet’s paramours praised her as a great man who just happened to be a woman. Her French translation of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica is still textbook material in France today. She improved on Newton’s theory on momentum and energy ideas but more importantly her advance ideas on light and its velocity was way ahead of her time. 

It was on those foundational thoughts on conservation of energy and light that, in no simple but indirect ways, led to E=mc².  We know ‘m’ to be mass but why ‘c’ for the speed of light?  It is from “celeritas”, Latin for swiftness or as an attribute of something very fast.  And what can be faster than light itself?

The other woman was Lisa Meitner who, like Einstein, was also a Jewish scientist but of Austrian citizenship who happened to do her research in Germany before the country fell into Nazism.  Albert was lucky to get out before Hitler’s campaign against the Jews begun while Meitner had to be smuggled out by Dutch scientist colleagues later.  Her work on nuclear physics is barely a footnote because her German mentor received the Nobel Prize for physics when Meitner had much to contribute to it; at the very least, she should have been a co-awardee. Unfortunately, at that time women were kept out of research leadership positions.  Ironically, the German mentor who remained in Germany in pursuit of splitting the atom corresponded with Meitner while she was in exile and continued to consult her ideas. It was, in fact, her insight and calculations that gave his mentor the edge towards nuclear fission to produce the first atomic bomb.  Fortunately for the Allied Forces, Germany was then under a barraged of U.S. and British air bombardment curtailing drastically its ability to produce heavy water.  Lisa Meitner solved the puzzle that physicists were grappling with.  They were bombarding the nucleus of uranium atoms hoping to see the nuclei increase in mass.  Instead what they observed was the opposite.  There was a loss of mass.  Meitner concluded that the loss of mass was due to the fact that some of it was being converted into energy as the atom’s nuclei were being split.

Meanwhile, Einstein wrote to FDR about unleashing the power of the atom by converting matter into energy through nuclear fission.  He warned that the Germans were close to doing it as he was tuned to the development there from fellow scientists.  Thus began the Manhattan Project and the rest is history.

This is just an example of how the speed of knowledge and information can perhaps lead humanity towards knowing everything.  It does seem like a feasible track, but is it?  It took less than seventy years from the first 120 foot flight at Kitty Hawk to landing on the moon.  The science for the lunar trip was Newtonian cosmology and the on board computer on the moon lander paled in comparison to a $10 hand held calculator today in terms of computational power.  We can go on to talk about leap frogging development in medicine, machines, engineering, computers, telecommunication, manufacturing, etc. and we will have to say that the multiplying effect will have no boundary by which to curtail our ability to know everything.  I happen to believe we are not likely ever to know everything.

1)      For every knowledge we gain about anything new questions emerge

When Anton van Leeuwenhoek first improved the microscope and saw clearly the structures of cells, when before that a bacterium was thought to be the smallest living matter we can see, scientists thought they had reached the wall on magnification. Now, electron microscopes had gone down to the level of the structure of DNA and we now can see a picture of the individual atom.  When we thought the atom, the nucleus and electrons comprised the smallest components of matter we now know about quarks and the Higgs boson. But the curtain is about to open up to “strings” as the basic building block of matter that are so small they can only be conjured in eleven dimensions.  String theory is sure to blow our mind, but eleven dimensions?  We can barely deal with four – Time being the fourth dimension.

2)      The Enigma of Time

Speaking of time, Einstein died not knowing that his theory on time was correct all along when solid proof later on was provided by super accurate atomic clocks.  Now we know that an atomic clock at the top of the Empire State building will run a little faster compared to a similar clock at the basement.  So, an executive who spends more time at the penthouse office will age faster than the janitor below by 100 millionth of a second in their lifetime.  That’s negligible, obviously, but when we’re talking GPS satellites 250 miles out in space the time differential can be so great that if it is not correctively synchronized every hour on the hour, you can be off by 6 miles after just a day of driving without correction; in a month, you could be in another time zone. Additionally you must also account and adjust for the speed of the satellite, because speed causes the clock to slow down.  I don’t think we will ever know why time behaves that way, except via Einstein’s equations.  We will not know for example if the twin paradox theory is true.  That is, if a twin astronaut leaves in a spaceship and travel at 90% the speed of light, he will come back (still alive, aging normally) but find that his twin brother is long gone because a few hundred years had elapsed. But Old Albert’s theory says that to be true.  Einstein doubted too that black holes could exist because his theory predicted that in a black hole the laws of physics will no longer work and time may actually stand still.

When Thomas Edison was asked what he thought of Einstein’s theories.  He replied, “I don’t think much about it because I don’t understand it”.

3)      Size Does Matter

Will the average human mind, even collectively of the six billion people in the world, be able to comprehend a solid block of iron the size of Mt. Everest compressed to a space occupied by a grain of sand?  Try contemplating a star ten times bigger than our sun, collapsing on itself from a sphere of 8.6 million miles in diameter into the size of a small city in a matter of ¼ of one second.  Einstein predicted it and today cosmic black holes are widely accepted to exist. Short of actually taking a picture of a black hole – we cannot because no light can escape from its clutches – it is beyond doubt that it exists.  It is estimated that our galaxy alone may contain millions of them and at the center is one super massive black hole that feeds on other very large objects, stars and even other black holes that come close to it.  We’ve established that light travels very fast – 186,000 miles per second – incomprehensibly swift but try to imagine that one of those flickering lights in the night sky left its source long before the collapse of the Roman Empire.  What about light that left its source when the dinosaurs were still roaming around?  That might seem frivolously pointless to even imagine the source of that light but think that its distance from us is a mere fraction of the girth of the universe. Some places we will never see because there is not enough time for light to reach us.  And yet, as incomprehensibly huge the universe is, the entire amount of visible matter (all the galaxies and stars combined) is a mere 5% or less of the total.  Now, we’re being told that 68% is dark energy and 27% dark matter.  If you say, “that is insane”, I am there to agree with you.  Then, are there intelligent beings somewhere in the vast universe who may know?

4)      We will not know what we cannot know

Let’s go inside the mind of a single fish, perhaps pretend to be one of hundreds in a school, lazily swimming around under twenty feet of water.  Think for a minute when out of the surface of the water from above came down a thin filament with a morsel of food attached to something like a curved fin and the fish next to you grabbed it quickly.  It was running away with the food when suddenly it was pulled up, yanked away with such force that it disappeared from view entirely in an instant.  It was gone.  How were you to explain what just happened?  Something from out of your world caused one of you to disappear.  You could be the Einstein of fishes but there was no way you could ever imagine what it is like above the surface of the water.  You were captive by the dimension of your own watery world.  You have no idea that other living things breathe not through the gills as you do and they inhabit the bottom of an ocean of air. As a fish you cannot know what you do not have the ability to know.

5)      Will we be able to read the Mind of God as Stephen Hawking suggested?

I recall a scientist, a Jesuit priest, if I remember correctly, who gave this analogy. 

Suppose we live as characters in a comic strip, drawn by an illustrator, who is thus the creator of the two dimensional world that we inhabit.  Suppose the creator gave us the power of life, the intelligence and free will to go about our life as we pleased; however, we are still confined to the pages of a flat paper.  One day, we began asking, “What is out there beyond our flat world?  Who created us?”  We do not see the extra third dimension, the depth that the illustrator has so he can actually see from above, while holding a pen or pencil, and see his characters “come to life” as he draws them.  He not only lives with the extra dimension to see from above what he was drawing, he was also experiencing the concept of time differently from how we do.

As hard as we try to know, using all the knowledge we can muster, we are still confined to a world from which we cannot get out from to see, “what’s out there?” We will never know using only the information we get from our own flat world to understand what’s outside of it. We need to transcend from that world in order to understand what’s outside of it.  It is only then that we can get a glimpse of who illustrated us.  That is where possibly, in my opinion, science can transition to philosophy and religion, just as the latter had transitioned to the former early in history.  How else do we go about it?  Insisting on only using science, with all its limitation, and ignoring another method of thinking to achieve the goal of knowing everything is sure to limit our ability to understand. 

This takes us back to the anonymous writer who said, 

“I’d rather not know some things than know absolutely about everything.  Trust me I know.”

6)      It is next to impossible to define consciousness

To quote Einstein again, he said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

The source of imagination is as varied as there are individual minds.  So, what is the human mind?  To have a working mind means to have consciousness.  And consciousness seems to defy science.  Something seems to be working outside of the physical brain.  At least many of us think so.  It is only through our mind that we can transport ourselves from here to somewhere else or to places only we can imagine, to any time other than now or yesterday, to what could have been instead of what really happened.  Only in our mind can we look at as many scenarios as we want before we decide to do anything, but alas, why are we only able to do or experience only one of them?

Finally, I leave you with this.  Today it is no longer just matter and energy that make up our world because information is admittedly the third component. Information – light, sound, touch, etc. – is how individual cells survive, how our ancestors made our journey to today possible, how everything works in nature, in fact.  Information is the medium by which we perceive reality.  Without information we, everyone and everything around us, the whole universe, in fact, ceases to exist. And the most important of all is the information we have in our mind. It must be conserved the same way as matter and energy, so where does it go when we cross the threshold of the great beyond?