The Fredösphere

Painted Matter reviews a reviewer on the metaphysical musings of Roger Penrose.  First we get a quote from the Martin Gardner review:

For Penrose, science is a neverending effort to penetrate the secrets of what Einstein liked to call the Old One. He has no sympathy for those who think that all underlying principles of physics have now, or soon will be, discovered. (See John Horgan’s book The End of Science.) For all we know, the universe may have infinite levels of sub-basements and infinite levels of attics in the opposite direction.

and then this reaction:

The secrets of the Old One are indeed painted with “beauty, magic, and mystery of Being”. What a great article about what appears — from the review — to be a difficult, but great book about the theater of our existence.

So we can divide the world into yet another pair of dueling camps:  those confident in man's eventual mastery of physical knowledge, and the rest of us.  I have had this belief -- that the universe's complexity is practically infinite -- from as far back as I can remember, and it is so fundamental to my world view that I can recall the shock and vertigo I felt when I discovered not all people shared it.

More depressing is the possibility that man's ability to learn new facts is limited.  Eventually, man's knowledge will be so vast, an entire lifetime of study will no longer be sufficient for one person to learn enough to make a new discovery.  This limit will certainly be approached unless radically improved methods are discovered to create grouped consiousness (hey, it could happen on some level anyway).  Shades of the -- yes, yes, yes! -- Teilhard de Chardin's Noösphere, or at least Vaneevar Bush's* Memex, which has more or less been achieved in our day (minus the goofy forehead cam).  O Great Google, hear your children's prayers!

*Check out this picture of Vannevar Bush.  I hear him saying something.  "You're not a member of the establishment, are you? ... I didn't think so."