[RightWhale]

People can't agree on simple things like what is the best temperature for sleeping or whether scrambled eggs ought to be hard or soft. If one person can't possibly know everything and two or more people will disagree on what they know, what hope is there of a committee knowing everything or what basis is there for saying everything is knowable? Seems like the committee, while pooling resources, rarely gets a universally satisfactory result.

[Little Bill]

This a question we used to kick around in school. Science demands that things be testable and repeatable, but are there things that can be known only by inferance and untestable directly?

What if this bit of data only occures in some instances and not in others when doing the same experiment? This implies more hidden data and the fact that the great leaps in knowing are accomplished by on man in a room thinking.

I don't think that we will ever know all of everything we want to know. When I was doing projects many years ago a friend of mine had a poster in his cube, that said; "Beware of the hidden variable."

[boris]

"People can't agree on simple things like what is the best temperature for sleeping or whether scrambled eggs ought to be hard or soft."

Careful. I'm a bigendian myself and we could rekindle the big-endian, small-endian wars.

--Boris