Is there a limit to knowledge?

Post Reply New Topic

^
[teenager answer]

I misconstrue?

Just a lame joke.

Oh. ^_^
"I note that you are 117 years old, Teenagers have strange ideas. You will grow out of it."
Yes I am a teenage-turtle,

Interesting since human brains can only take up so much knoweledge in a lifetime. Aside from that, sometimes certain knoweledges that were once learned are flawed in the future. That is after time progresses into new ideas and tools that we never thought would exist.

Must be the dawning of the age of aquarius.....

"one need make decisions without all the information." - sheldon kopp (paraphrased)

fortunately, we have something called instinct.

There is a basic limit to knowledge built into nature. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

ruveyn

And of course the uncertainty principle might apply to itself.

No Clyde. It applies to pairs of conjugate Hermitean observables such as momentum and position. Before entering you clever remarks you should perhaps learn some physics?pIf p and q are conjugaqte observables then
pq - qp = i/h. Conjugate observables do not commute.

ruveyn

With my own eyes I have seen conjugate observables commute on the line between Manhattan and New York City at 34th street.

well we have about 100 billion neurons, and each of them can be a conduit in a neural pathway of recognized and consciously perceived excitation.
the neurons are not "devoted" to the neural pathways they are conduits to.
they can be used in multitudes of different pathways that have little relationship with each other.

since each of the hundred billion neurons can be an element in thousands of different neural pathways, it is obvious that the amount of possibilities of perceptions within the mind is astronomical.
the limiting factor is the acquisition of these pathways. it takes time to learn and time does not go long enough for any human to fill their neural pathway possibilities.

a human does not have the mental energy to acquire even a small fraction of what they could potentially know.

the personality is also a limiting factor. some people are lazy and are not inquisitive.
but some people are burning with passionate curiosity.

those that burn with curiosity and have crystal minds will learn (and discover) most in their lives, but their stock of their knowledge compared to all the facts the universe contains.. is zero (x/infinity=0)anyway.

is it really the way to go to try to understand what can never be explained?
i have pitted my mind against some perplexing questions and i have gained some ideas within the scope of my inquiries.

but still i understand that no matter how much i know, i still know nothing compared to what there is possible to know.
nevertheless... i have the energy in my head to question, and be interested in the answer i deduce.
i can not ignore that energy, and when i die, i will know a lot that i will instantly forget.

i do not know whether knowledge is useful after death, but i like to know what i am looking at while i am alive, and i will always find a way to explain what i see to myself.

there is no "practical" limit to knowledge i believe. you can keep acquiring more and more all through your life and never fill your capacity for it. and knowledge is free.

No you haven't. You don't know what a Hermitian Observable is.

ruveyn

Great! I was searching for that quote for my signature.

Huh!? Where is it?
I guess I need to do some research on the html.

Well, actually the commute was between Manhattan and Newark, so you might have a point. But perhaps you mean in physics, particularly in quantum physics, a system observable is a property of the system state that can be determined by some sequence of physical operations. For example, these operations might involve submitting the system to various electromagnetic fields and eventually reading a value off some gauge. In systems governed by classical mechanics, any experimentally observable value can be shown to be given by a real-valued function on the set of all possible system states. In quantum physics, on the other hand, the relation between system state and the value of an observable is more subtle, requiring some basic linear algebra for its description. In the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, states are given by non-zero vectors in a Hilbert space V (where two vectors are considered to specify the same state if, and only if, they are scalar multiples of each other) and observables are given by self-adjoint operators on V. However, as indicated below, not every self-adjoint operator corresponds to a physically meaningful observable. For the case of a system of particles, the space V consists of functions called wave functions or state vectors.

In quantum mechanics, measurement of observables exhibits some seemingly unintuitive properties. Specifically, if a system is in a state described by a vector in a Hilbert space, the measurement process affects the state in a non-deterministic, but statistically predictable way. In particular, after a measurement is applied, the state description by a single vector may be destroyed, being replaced by a statistical ensemble. The irreversible nature of measurement operations in quantum physics is sometimes referred to as the measurement problem and is described mathematically by quantum operations. By the structure of quantum operations, this description is mathematically equivalent to that offered by relative state interpretation where the original system is regarded as a subsystem of a larger system and the state of the original system is given by the partial trace of the state of the larger system.

Physically meaningful observables must also satisfy transformation laws which relate observations performed by different observers in different frames of reference. These transformation laws are automorphisms of the state space, that is bijective transformations which preserve some mathematical property. In the case of quantum mechanics, the requisite automorphisms are unitary (or antiunitary) linear transformations of the Hilbert space V. Under Galilean relativity or special relativity, the mathematics of frames of reference is particularly simple, and in fact restricts considerably the set of physically meaningful observables.

But one must keep in mind:
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

I have found that the more I learn, the less I know. I think that what we can learn is infinite since we often discover that what was learned may be untrue and therefore must be learned again. I am confident that no one will ever really know it all. Then again, ask me in 10 years and I may have a different answer .

Ten years will most probably not offer you ultimate knowledge. What you are not aware of is frequently the proper interaction of what you already think you know. Many of the basic facts if the phenomena of the universe were well known before Einstein but they did not fit together very well. Einstein demonstrated a better fit. It was not a matter of knowing more but rather knowing better arrangements of what was known.