[Examples of mathematical chaos] — leaves fluttering in the wind, water splashing in a stream, Ping-Pong balls bouncing together down wooden stairs — are beautiful prototypes for KNOWLEDGE DISAPPEARANCE. They show how facts about the status of a thing, good as gold when first acquired, can degrade over time. They show how perfectly logical theories can become 100 percent wrong if extrapolated too far into the future. They show how some kinds of knowledge can be more important than others—how failure to know key things, whatever they are, can prevent you from putting a puzzle together, no matter how much inferior data you amass. In other words, they show that knowledge disappearance is not imaginary or an unfortunate consequence of your own stupidity but a commonplace natural phenomenon.
- Physicist, Robert B. Laughlin, on disappearance in Crime of Reason, pg 28. In a recent interview on the radio program “To The Best of Our Knowledge” he decried the so-called “Information Age” as, ironically (and sadly) a new “Dark Age.” Emphasis which-a-way’s.
