Anyone following my blog will understand that my central interest is the discovery and introduction of new knowledge and certainly not massaging old received truths. Yet what is so poorly understood is that this is unexpectedly difficult.
We spend all our energy on what is known knowledge, and struggle to extend that into knowable knowledge. Yet most knowledge is of the type we simply do not know that we do not know and neither does anyone else.
We all understand that gravity exists and in fact we know it. It still took Newton 2000 years after Aristotle to postulate a formal axiom or law. Now we know that at least the observed motion of objects inside our solar system follow those laws. A century ago, einstein accepted that gravity induces our local geometry and that this leads to the General Theory.
In te meantime, our mathematica has led us slightly astray to accept infinity as mathematical rather than empiracal. Yet every possibility of creation tells us otherwise. A Galaxy is created long ago and we can see it extended out to it limits as a sublight object. It seems to be as old as the universe but so fnite.
Let me share a tale. Back in High school, our math teacher, one day did an experiment. He posed a problem with no antecedents and asked us to solve it. It was slightly misleading but not fatally so. none of us solved it. Thirty students made no headway. Yet it was trivial with a change of petrspective.
That is just how hard it is for the best minds to create new knowldege. It is not hard to weave the known together to produce new perspectives.
The true power of science has always been repetition. Eventually something can fall out.
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