Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Can you put planks across an abyss

Max Planck is said to have said (I hesitate assuming he wrote in German, and myself finding translations often lead to distortion):

Science ... means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp...

I like this quote. I don't like where I found it, in a book which has the phrase "Quantum-Mystical" in the title. You might think that is what I have been pointing to, and you would not be wrong. But I don't like this labeling of the unknown. It violates the very nature of the unknown. The thinking that Jan Cox demonstrated was that you carry rational thought as far as possible. You cannot then, plant a flag on some further territory.

Words obscure the reality of the mystical as much, even more, than they clog the apprehension of the knowable. In the latter though, words serve an important function.

So it makes no sense to find an edge ,and say aha. Here is what I meant. No, you have thereby, in the flagging of it, lost it.

Yes, it is tough. There are of course, rewards along the way.