Friday, June 6, 2008

The Thirst of Knowledge


Ignorance is Bliss ....ahem ahem...Why do I start with a statement that contradicts what I wanted to tell...hmm..may be just writing down whatever comes to mind...

It might be possible only for Google to tell that some search is completed. But everyone's heart is searching for something all through the life and there are hardly a few hearts that say that the search was completed. Do I need to give so many build ups even after putting it in the topic ? Yes, every mind is struggling hard to know so many things..so many things that it is not able to understand..so many things that have not been taught by anyone....so many things that it can never see...so many things that are monstrous ...so many things that are above the dimensions it can feel.

Einstein rightly said :"There are two things that can be infinite..One is the universe and other is the human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former one". It is a stupid thing to ask " What do you know ?" to a person because nobody knows anything perfectly. Is there anything in the world that you know completely ? People say that they know English ...they just know some...you know enough to communicate with people. If you know English then you will never refer back to a dictionary again..If the human race knows Science completely, then there will be no more research going on...

Nobody knows the entire History. Nobody can ever think of mastering the subject of Mathematics. Obviously nobody knows why certain things happen in Chemistry (any discussion of this statement can be continued in the comments part) . Does anyone on this world know the whole of Music ?

Say you are very good in a game.But still do you know every nuances of the game? Do you know the name of every street in your town where you have been born and brought up ? They may be unimportant and we dont bother to know them all...all I come to say is that you will never know anything fully. But the search I meant is after things that are of ultimate importance.

We don't even know how we do things that we do everyday. Do you digest your food knowing how it is digested? Did you grow up purposefully ? Do you know how you are able to read and how you are able to understand what I say ? Does your brain know what the brain is ? Does it understand its existence by itself ?

We know ourselves to some extent only by human anatomy. Our mind needs to be taught how it should control itself. We struggling hard to imitate ourself to form the Artificial Intelligence but the question of it being possible remains still.

It is a human tendency to justify something which he cant do. So I start up with my usual mokkai (because that is my trademark )to extend a well known theory for aruguement. I ask you a question : Is it possible at all to know things ? . Well , I ll come to this answer in a round about way.

Mokkai starts:

Prof.Vijayan, a physics stud will say that to know about any particle you should ask two questions to it. 1) Where are you ? 2) Are you driving ?....ie a particle's position and its velocity are required to know its current state. But in addition if you know its acceleration as a function of time you can tell its state at any point of time and you can say yourself that you know everything about the particle(assumed mass is known so momentum,kinetic energy and its deBroglie wavelength also known). But to give solution for any problem we should begin with the smallest speck of it and so I started with a particle. But the theory that deals with particles in a good amount is Quantum. So lets go Quantum...

Heinsenburg Uncertainity principle says that its not at all possible to know the exact position and velocity of any particle simultaneously. That means at a given time you cannot tell both its postion and velocity and so you do not know its state at any point of time..in other words you know nothing about the particle at any point of time. Its not that we are not able to measure it but the particle itself doesn't have anything as such. Stephen Hawkin in his book "The Universe in a Nutshell" states that experiments yield that a particle can never be in a position at a point of time. It has a probability distribution function which it obeys. Atmost you can know its pdf. Extending the theory to macroscopic particles and concept, human can never know things fully. All we can know is a part of the thing which we consider given by a kind of function similar to pdf. Therefore a complete knowledge of anything is declared to be impossible.

I state a paradox here.." I know nothing". If somebody says this , then he/she knows a big truth that one has to know and so what he says becomes false. [:P]

Before I conclude, I am going to put max-mokkai :
Extension of Uncertainity principle says that there is no fate. Because even a particle has a freedom of choosing
within a certain limit where it wants to be . Nobody can force it to be in a particular state. So we too have an oppurtunity of choosing our own state under some constraints. All you need to do is understand the function of yours and get the best out of you... :)...Just leave a comment and go ahead with your work. You have already wasted a lot of time reading this. :P