What it is to know something?

The Egyptians understood the relationship between angles and sides length in a right angled triangle but did not know that A^2+B^2=C^2. They had tables for every triangle they knew. The formula is very powerful, the can predict as yet unknown triangles.

Newton was able to describe gravity but he did not know how gravity works. It took Einstein to figure out how gravity works hundreds of years later. Newton thought Gravity acts instantaneously across any distance. But Gravity cannot travel faster than light. Newton got this fundamentally wrong but what it did has huge value. We could predict the impact of gravity but only as long was we stayed within certain parameters, but we did not understand these parameters.

What does this mean for what we know and how we know other things?

Global Warming for instance.

We know a lot, but we really don't know how the world works, how all the components of the world interact, this means that we cannot accurately predict over the long term and we don't understand the parameters under which the predictions we do make are true. But still we need to act and can act with some confidence. When is the information enough information to act?


Reference: Lost Discoveries by Dick Teresi