ion I was bombarded with a multitude of answers but none of which fit the question. The computer could show me how to print multiple copies of this essay, and how to get this essay on to the Internet where mathematicians and artists alike could see it. Yet it could not tell me why nothing is certain. And then I realized the computer could not answer the question because it was not certain why nothing was known for certain. In the movie The Ascent of Man the narrator points out that the goal of physical science is to paint an exact picture of all material, in the same sentence he says that the crowning achievement of physical science is that the exact picture is unattainable. All information is imperfect. The artist and the poet have come to accept and nurture that realization. The painter knows when he paints a beach he will not get every grain of sand on the canvas, nor does he want to. He wants to get the concept of a beach just as Euclid wanted to show the concept of a straight line even though Newton proved it physically impossible.Nothing can be known with certainty because mans sphere of knowledge expands each day. It is like The Cave. We accept the shadows on the wall as the knowledge, and that there is nothing else. These shadows on the wall, which everyone comes to accept as the only way, soon die out and fade away when the sunlight of actual knowledge pours in to the cave. But how are we to know that this sunlight is not actually a high powered flashlight. The things we once accepted as facts are now myths and the things that are facts may soon be myths. As the universe is constantly moving so is knowledge. One cannot pinpoint the exact location of an atom for more than a fraction of a second; the same is true for knowledge. One cannot prove something true without five others proving the same thing false. To reiterate, by studying we change what we study, if we change what we study each time we study it, it will be different s...
