"All models are wrong; some models are useful" (George Box) Is there a state in which a civilization can say "we know everything there is to know"? Is the chain of discoveries and inventions an endless one? Or is there a point where it all stops, and there will be nothing left in the universe that can surprise us? At first it seems that knowledge has no bounds, because when we invent/discover something, the new information can be combined with older building blocks - thus something new is obtained. The more elements you have, the more ways there are to combine them - so there is clearly no bound. Here is a simple example, we only have 10 digits: {0, 1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9} - but we can write an infinite number of numbers with these 10 digits; i.e. the number of things we can do is infinite, while the number of building blocks is finite. Read more! »