Partial Theories - Why not everything can be known

Noted in Brian Greene's "Fabric of the Universe" that theories are established in discrete steps. Newtonian mechanics for example was established without any knowledge of atoms. He poses the question of what a universe would be like in which we had to know everything to know anything.

This final question links well with Total and Ultimate Systems (previous blogged). The problem we have in knowing anything is to find the building blocks of that theory; a theory must have its terms. The atomic theory is the theory where we define everything in terms of atoms. Put another way a theory must itself be something - a system of symbols, a system of practices, a system ultimately of rules of some game (where I have avoided so far in this blog, just as Wittgenstein did, of defining that term itself - rules of a game. Watching BBC Horizon "What happened before the Big Bang" I actually felt a great sense of relief that physics is now aware that the Big Bang can't explain where things (in general) came from and only explain this particular universe. It is a bit depressing that I remember my father talking about all the ideas in this program in the early 80s - so what is being portrayed as new thinking is really just a change in emphasis - there are still no new ideas in Physics. String theory pioneer Michio Kaku also satisfyingly referred to various ideas of Nothing including both absence of matter, absence of space/time and even that Nothing I am interested in of the absence of even equalities and equations. Obviously the latter is beyond formal definition and can only be shown by some reductio absurdum within a formal system (which is exactly what the SRH is looking for).

The idea of "knowing everything" is a contradiction because we have to stand somewhere to frame, or ground, our theory and so that assumption of where we stand can't be "in" the theory. This inside/outside of a theory, this recognition that every theory (indeed everything) depends upon something that is not-itself (a la Buddha) puts science is a very odd place. It means that it is forever chasing its tail and the dream of final/absolute/real truth is an illusion.

So whatever we know there MUST be something we don't know upon which the theory stands. This is the essence of the SRH but I don't understand why this MUST be the case. As a corollary (and the reason for this blog) it must follow then that every theory MUST be a partial theory. So the observation by Greene that Physics comes in a collection of incomplete theories is not a feature of this universe but a logical necessity of what knowing is at all.

It follows from this that we can safely argue that a universe in which everything in known is actually a contradiction. Now that is the SRH.

Indeed thinking this through it was present in the opening statement. A universe where we need to know everything before we can formulate a theory has no starting place. If we need to know about atoms to form a theory of gravitation then we would need to know something about atoms to form a theory of atoms and so on ad infinitum. By definition we MUST be able to form a theory based upon "what is not known". Theories MUST contain "what is not known" otherwise there would be no theories. But what is known and what is not-known are by definition different so we have our dichotomy proven.

This known/unknown is the same as use/mention etc explore further...