What if knowledge was infinite? What I mean by this is that scientific knowledge – quantitative understanding – may never reach an end. This would mean that our ignorance would be total. We could never claim full knowledge, since whatever our share of all knowledge would be, it would never be whole or total. Our understanding would remain forever incomplete. A fraction of infinite knowledge would never increase the sum total of our understanding, and a fraction of infinity is meaningless in terms of total quantity. Any share of infinity is infinitesimal, and does not help us reach the totality of knowing.
If the cosmos is infinite in extent – and by this I mean in terms of spacetime and matter-energy – we would also have no way of knowing whether our knowledge of the universe is ever complete and total. The universe is simply the concept for all there is, for all that we can know, for all that can be known. If we traveled on for vast eons through the cosmos, we could never be certain that the universe didn’t end somewhere, at some time. We can postulate an infinite universe, but the only way we’d ever know that the universe wasn’t infinite is if at some point, at some time, we reached its end. The hypothesis of an infinite cosmos is nonfalsifiable, and therefore not apprehensible to the scientific method.
It is the same with knowledge. We have no way of knowing whether quantifiable knowledge ever has an end unless we reach its end. There is a tremendous search for the Theory of Everything, the Grand Unified Theory, yet perhaps the universe is essentially unknowable because it was created by the unknowable.
It could be argued that we are in a simulation, and some learned people have hypothesized that it’s likely we are simulated beings. If this is true, then the upper limits of knowledge would be the repository of information discovered and held by the beings who simulate the cosmos. We could encounter extraterrestrials so advanced that they’d be indistinguishable from God. We might regard them as gods. Yet, then who made the beings who simulated us? The problem remains one of infinite regress. We never get to the bottom of the original question: How did all this come into being? The inference we can draw from this is that our knowledge will always remain incomplete.
Maybe knowledge itself is infinite because it was created by the infinite. It is perhaps rather arrogant of us to believe that we’ll ever figure the universe out completely, that it can be known with totality and with certainty. These are the philosophical implications of the Uncertainty Principle, which intuited an essential unknowability of quantum phenomenon, at the behavior of particles at the quantum scale.
Thus, even though the cosmos may be quantifiable, it may never be completely known.
© 2025 by Michael C. Just