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This interesting story of a man who was rapaciously knowledgeable and wrote an apparently superhuman number of works is made distracting by the "knew everything
by leephillips 9y ago
This interesting story of a man who was rapaciously knowledgeable and wrote an apparently superhuman number of works is made distracting by the "knew everything" claim. It's distracting because the mind inevitably searches out things that he probably didn't know: was he familiar with the General Theory of Relativity? did he read Sanskrit and Mandarin? what were his views on the recent progress in the theory of fields and rings? Really, no one can know everything -- but that doesn't make his life any less remarkable.
- Xeoncross 9y agoYes, even in that day and time I am sure he would not have made this claim about himself. There were tens of thousands of specialty fields for everything from glass blowing to animal husbandry to machine design and explosives. He was amazing, but the amount of knowledge at this time is far greater than this article makes it out to be.
- leephillips 9y agoEspecially as he knew so much, and the more you know, the more you know that you know so little. Only the deeply ignorant feel that they know everything (there was a poor fellow arguing here recently that he knew everything that was worth knowing about philosophy. His responses to challenges revealed that he knew nothing about it at all).
- antonvs 9y ago> was he familiar with the General Theory of Relativity? Probably not very, since he was 80 years old when it was first published. But that's kind of the point - before theories like that existed, the scope of human knowledge about the world was such that one person could have pretty good grasp of it, since the state of knowledge about each individual topic made it much more accessible to non-experts.