“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”
Ralph W. Sockman, 1946
The best sentence I ever heard about knowledge was delivered to me almost as an insult. I was a teenager, and Bhaskara Iyer — a man whose command of English I have not, in all the years since, seen bettered — was explaining, without much tact, why his English was better than mine. I am superior to you, he said, only in my ignorance. I know that I don’t know, but you don’t.
At the time, I was bemused and heard it mostly as ‘humble-brag.’ It took years to understand that he was describing what a long apprenticeship to anything truly means. The ignorance of the specialist, the expert, the highly informed.
In 1967 the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot asked, half seriously, how long the coast of Britain actually is, and found that the answer depends on the length of your ruler. A coastline is effectively an approximation at every scale. Ignorance (or knowledge, rather) behaves the same way. The closer a specialist looks at the length of their own coastline, the longer it gets.
History supplies more versions of the same illusion. Albert Michelson (a Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist) told his audience once that physics was ‘substantially finished’, the grand principles were in place, and all that remained was simply a question of refinements of measurements. Eleven years later Einstein published special relativity, quite possibly the greatest feat of explanatory science in the history of humanity. Michelson was reporting, faithfully, how the coastline looked from where he stood. His error was mistaking the map for the territory.
A lifelong devotion to mastering a subject redraws the map in the pursuit of continuously illuminating more of the territory. What a true student experiences is the intensity of the frontier increasing commensurate with his knowledge. And walking that shoreline of wonder is one of the true joys and mysteries of life, and the universe.