I think that one of the hardest things we face as a critical, analytical human race is the fact that nothing is ever, EVER absolute. I know that this is one of the hardest things for me to accept. I go through school and learn all these equations, all these systems, all these facts and truths that have been accepted by the world. But the fact is, nothing that we know, aside from history, is absolutely true. I would bet you my life, and my future children’s lives, as well as the lives of everyone I know and love that I will wake up tomorrow and be me; be myself. Nobody has ever woken up a new person (well, aside from the clinically insane). But just because it hasn’t happened before, how can we be certain that it won’t happen? I will make the same wager with you about gravity. I’ll bet you everything I love that gravity will still be there tomorrow. It’s always been there. But how can we say that gravity won’t disappear? The fact of the matter is, it probably won’t. It’s absolutely foolish to think that it will. But it cannot be said in 100% truth and certainty.
We, as living thinking beings, strive to attain this universal truth to explain anything and everything. We strive to find infinity. We aim to find some sort of equation that tells the story of everything. And we simply won’t get there. Infinity doesn’t exist. Infinity is a concept that we invented in order to try to make things absolute; in order to make claims about things we cannot ever attain. But we cannot let this hamper our efforts to reach such a goal. We will never be able to achieve a universal truth that we can claim with 100% certainty. But we can get extremely close. We can certainly get close enough to rest assured that our claims are correct, to not worry that we are wrong. We can get to “infinity minus one over infinity”, if you will. That fact alone is reason enough to get out of bed and explore the world, to make strides and advancements and discoveries. Maybe a better way to look at it is, rather than saying we can never reach an absolute truth (infinity), saying that there is an infinite amount of discoveries to be made. We must not let the quality of unattainability prevent our curiosity. But we must keep in the back of our minds the thought that nothing is absolute. We must reserve the right to question absolutely everything. We must pursue our curiosity and aspire to learn as much as we possibly can, while respecting the awesome uncertainty intertwined into the universe.
Actually, i retract an earlier statement. Mathematics can be stated with 100% certainty. 1+1 must be 2. It doesn’t matter what symbols are used to portray it, it must be true. There are, of course, fields of mathematics that deal with probability, theory, etc. But the fundamentals of mathematics are universally true. That fascinates me. Nobody ever realizes how powerful math really is.
That’s all for now.
