3 ms·
What do you mean by "will eventually go to zero"? Decrease monotonously? That seems kind of obvious: knowledge expands and rarely shrinks (barring WW3).
by wlievens 16y ago
What do you mean by "will eventually go to zero"? Decrease monotonously? That seems kind of obvious: knowledge expands and rarely shrinks (barring WW3).
- Jun8 16y agoIn layman's terms here's what I was trying to say: think of the set of (scientific, which could be a muddy distinction) questions to which currently there's no clear explanation, e.g. do magnetic monopoles exist, what is the nature of dark matter, etc. The question is whether eventually this set will be getting smaller (or even zero, because there might a finite number of things to know in the universe, and once we explain everything, that's it)
- timwiseman 16y agoI think the answer to this is clearly no. Answers tend to spawn more questions not fewer. More formally, if you are considering mathematics to fit with your idea of science, then Godel's Incompleteness Theorem shows that there is an infinite amount to learn and an infinite amount that can never be proven and yet is true. Even without appealing to Incompleteness, just look at the fact that Mathematics is spawn new subdisciplines at a regular rate and will always be able to do so.
- btilly 16y agoKnowledge expands, yes. But our number of outstanding reasonable hypotheses also expands. It is not clear what the ratio will do.