Quote:
Originally Posted by avandonk
Why I quote these fine BBC documentaries is that they do a far better job of explaining problems and some solutions that have needed our best minds to figure out than I ever could.
I have always found that teaching a subject alerts me to my own ignorance.
My mental model of the Universe is that all the complexity we see about us comes from very simple rules.
Finding these 'SIMPLE' rules is the tricky bit.
Watching those documentaries brings to life the men and women who's names you find littered in all the scientific texts and papers.
If all human knowledge was in English say then a fundamental rule would be all knowledge was fully described by twenty six letters and ten numbers.
It is not that simple! You need many more rules for grammar syntax etc and that is just for the language! All the mathematical operators also present a large zoo of things. We all have to agree on all the rules on how to record and read this information. We are not there yet!
You end up with many levels of complexity produced by simple rules. Education is the understanding of these rules.
Strange things also happen. Poetry, song and literature appear out of meaningless symbols that now transmit all human emotions and ideas.
The sum of the parts is far less than the whole structure.
It is like describing a new baby as 3kg of atoms.
Bert
|
You are wise Bert.
You have kept a balance and retained a perspective that must have been hard to do.
If there is one thing I have learnt it is that the more I learn the more I realise I and the rest of the bunch know little... it is hard to be proud of your acxhievements yet balance ones insignificance etc.... the funny thing I have found is that I dont want to tell folk what I know or think I know etc... realising perhaps my relationship to time and space...a blink of insignifficance ..and not to be bothered by that findingt.
alex