Limits of Human Kind

I was at a party a few days ago and I found myself playing the ever popular Guitar Hero with some friends. I was a bit drunk at the time so I wasn't playing as well as I could have if I were sober, but I wasn't doing too bad. On the song selection screen, I paused on one of the songs towards the bottom that sparked a memory. A few summers ago I played this game non-stop for weeks. I mastered the lower levels quite fast. As the songs got progressively harder, I spent more and more time trying to get the technique right. When I got to that one song though, I hit a brick wall. After a few hours of playing the same song over and over again and becoming increasingly frustrated, I shut the game off and went for a jog. I would come back to that one song the next day, the day after that, and so on until after about a week when I finally was able to complete it. I did a little celebration dance and then continued on to the next song. I did worse on this song than I did my first attempt on the previous one. Figuring it would take me 2 weeks this time, I decided to find something else to do with my time.

You start to wonder, is there a point at which there is no hope for improvement? On my jog I thought back to a concept I learned about back in high school algebra. You have a distance you have to travel, but you can only go half way each step. You get considerably closer with each step, but you'll never actually get there. You might never get there, but you'll also never stop getting closer. This is the idea of a limit. Putting this in real-life terms, the idea of that limit would equivalent to absolute truth, which is the goal of science.

I personally have a hard to time believing humans have the capacity to uncover such a truth. Perhaps such a truth doesn't actually exist. Maybe instead of the first example of cutting something in half indefinitely, think of the graph of X squared. It doesn't have a limit, but at the same time the rate at which it(X) increases decreases over time forever. It could be said that the limit is infinity.

It would seem that generally, for things to make most sense to us, everything has a beginning and ending. Thinking about the theory to the beginning of the universe: the big bang, something is essentially created from nothing. At least that's how most folks understand it. According to the theory, the universe was initially infinitely condensed. Now, I'm not even sure what that means, but it would seem to me that according to the theory, the universe was not created from nothing. Now, if there was something at the beginning of time, then that really wasn't the begging at all. Anyway, I've since adopted the idea of the infinite. I don't believe there was a beginning, and I don't believe there will be an end.

Getting back to my pessimistic view that humans are extremely limited to how much they can discover about the universe, I'd like to bring up the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I first encountered this idea in the book by Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. It describes in great detail the observer effect, which states that in order to measure something, you must touch it. By touching it, you are moving it, therefore rendering the measurement inaccurate. Related to particle physics, the uncertainty principle suggests that it is impossible to know both the exact location and momentum of a particle at any given moment.

This then gave way to quantum mechanics, which attempts to describe and predict the movements of subatomic particles, which appear to be random. Now, I have absolutely no knowledge of quantum mechanics, or even particle physics for that matter, but from what I know, I believe their movements only appear random because we don't have any real way of measuring them accurately. And no matter how sophisticated our equipment gets, I don't believe there's any real way of avoiding the observer effect. Our human measurements will forever be inaccurate. With our current problems of measurement, there might still exist even smaller particles that we aren't aware of, smaller than that of electrons, protons, and their constituents, a vast variety of quarks. Perhaps matter is infinitely small.

There's a saying that the journey is more important than the destination, which I think might have been Einstein. To me this is true because absolute destination doesn't really exist. The idea of a destination is important though because it provides us with a direction. Living day to day with the idea that you may never reach the end-all goal of a destination, you can find comfort in the evidence that you can continuously improve.