we’re getting somewhere
I feel we can understand how the world works. Just because we specialize in different fields does not mean we will continue to explode into an ungraspable knowledge.
The universe is intelligible. And a single human mind can “grok” it.
Some say the renaissance man is impossible today because there is more material to master. Some take this as an excuse to give up understanding the state of the art in physics, or medicine, or whatever.
When we write, we throw away 90% of the words because we got somewhere, where the 10% tells the tale BETTER than all the words spent getting there.
There is a crystallization. A chunking
- Chunking theory
- unifying theories
- Maxwell’s equations
- “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”
Sean Carroll does pretty well to communicate newer physics to be more easily graspable.
clear thinking is this whittling down, removal of the extraneous. Clear as in trasnparent, but also as if “clearing away” what is non-essential.