Knowing It All: The Pursuit of Knowledge, From Genesis to Google

The New York Times > Week in Review > Knowing It All: The Pursuit of Knowledge, From Genesis to Google
The article contends with the human ambition to know everything and the immediate drawback of memory - reading everything is not knowing everything and knowing everything is pretty much impossible as Ptolemey I found out oh so many centuries ago... Now Google wants to digitize a bunch of libraries... will that make the fish-eye of our lense and the diameter of our tunnel vision smaller or larger? As any graduate student knows - the more you learn the more you feel you need to learn. As the circumference of the tiny circle of knowledge increases so does the awareness of the vastness of the unkown surrounding it. The concept is simple and yet we persist.

I don't remember anything... most things I read fall together and I can recall mere whispers of the ideas. Sometimes, I pick up a paper and realize that I had read it in depth not too long ago when I get half way through it. More often, I pick up a paper I know I have read and discover that I do not remember anything! This is frightening, considering that I have cited this paper in my own work several times! Universal knowledge, ultimate knowledge is impossible... but we try, oh how we try...