Eclectic Wanderings

Sunday, September 30, 2012

The Evolution of Knowledge

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I was reflecting on the way theories evolve into knowledge the other day, and this image came to me (please excuse my art work; there is a reason I didn’t choose art as a profession).  Also, I was emphatically influenced by reading the book The Beginning of Infinity, by David Deutsch.  It seems the quest for knowledge begins with a desire or intent to explain something.  So there is a idea offered as an explanation.  This intent may point in a general direction, and then logic (perhaps in the form of criticism) and empirical data (experimentation) modifies the original explanation and narrows it , honing it down to a better and better theory of how the subject is explained.  At some point we call it knowledge.  This would tend to work on larger areas on enquiry, like physics, rather than mundane knowledge, like what is in the desk drawer.  We can see a progression in a broad sense of the above in Galileo –> Newton –> Einstein –> Heisenberg, Boor, et. al.  This may not be the only way knowledge is created, but it’s an idea.