Thursday, February 17, 2005

Wow Fades but Truth Lingers

Watching the History Channel do a snippet of a program on the development of medical imaging, it strikes me once more how much human understanding of the dynamic structure of the physical world has improved the past several centuries. This is not an original thought and not an uncommon thought. I suspect the moment of "wow that's true" wonderment is a universal human experience. The emotional "wow" component fades over time but the "that's true" belief lingers. Over time the accumulation of these moments produce the structure of our thinking and form the basis of our ability to determine the initial property of any statement as true or false.

True or false: I own the clothes I'm wearing.