The Paradox Of Knowledge

We generally consider having knowledge to be a good thing. But have you ever wondered if knowledge can be a disadvantage, if there can be such a thing as "knowing too much"?

It depends. If we just want to know what is then knowledge is a good thing. But if we are trying to create something new then it can be a disadvantage.

We have heard of a person being considered as not the best person for a particular job because they "know too much about the wrong way of doing things". The French Revolution is generally considered as initiating the modern political era. What was notable about it is that it was conducted mostly by young people lacking in political experience.

But that was what enabled them to create a new political order. If they would have been experienced they would have gone with what they knew and would never have been able to create a new order.

Albert Einstein once famously said that "imagination is more important than knowledge". When Einstein came up with his first theory of Relativity he was not a professional scientist. He was working as a patent clerk.

Maybe if he had been a professional scientist he never would have come up with his breakthrough new theory. His mind might have been too set in "things as they are".

In remember that when I came up with my cosmology theory, which is my version of string theory, I really didn't know much about string theory, which was first introduced in 1968. I had once read an article about the concept that what we perceive as particles, such as electrons, are actually strings and there are more spatial dimensions than the three that we can see.

I had picked up a book about string theory. It was a long book and I don't remember the name of it. I got about a third of the way through the book when I noticed that there is a relatively simple solution that makes so many unsolved mysteries of the universe just fall right into place.

I had been wondering what time exactly is but could find no answer anywhere. I noticed that a fundamental principle of science seemed to be the assumption that we have an unbiased view of the universe. But what if we don't? I concluded that we do not have an unbiased view of the universe, we see it as we do not only because of what it is but also because of what we are. 

The reason there was no satisfactory explanation of what time is was because we were looking in the wrong place, in the realm of physics. Time was actually within us, the movement of our consciousness along the bundles of strings comprising our bodies and brains at what we perceive as the speed of light, which also has no real explanation as to why it was that particular speed.

If I had a degree in cosmology, or if I had "known" all about it, the probability is that I would never have been able to take a "leap" outside the box, and to come up with a new way of looking at it. My mind would have been too locked into the existing ways of looking at it.

In the past many people who have made discoveries have been self-educated, or mostly self-educated. A university education is a wonderful thing but it inevitably means learning to think like everyone else. A self-educated person hasn't learned to think like everyone else, at least not to the same extent, and are therefore better suited to notice the things that no one else has noticed.