TWO BIG QUESTIONS OF THE FUTURE All I have said so far has been to prepare the ground for two big questions, dealing with what could be called the two basic mysteries of the future. The first big question is phil osophical, and can be stated fairly simply. With his intelligence, with his ability to make experi ments and to process information, does man have the potentiality of ever acquiring full information about the basic laws of nature? I am sure all of us have asked our selves this, or a similar question. Some of us believe that the final truth will always escape us, even though every discovery, every mathematical theorem brings us closer to it. Others of us believe that when we run into integral numbers, such as the number of protons and neutrons in a nucleus, we are approaching the ultimate basic knowledge. Tied to this first big question, there are other tempt ing questions. For instance, we have an information theory which has established a measure for the amount of information we can com municate to each other. Shall we, some day, have a measure of in telligence, or will intelligence al ways transcend a definition of it self? And even if we succeed in defining and measuring intelligence, shall we some day prove mathe matically the impossibility of intel ligence reaching the ultimate truth, just as the mathematician Godel has proved the existence of undemonstrable theorems? Shall we perhaps come to the paradoxical proposition that a supreme intelli gence should disprove the possi bility of its very existence? I do not want to linger on this speculation, no matter how fas cinating it may be. I want to come to the second big question. While we do not know whether or not we shall be able some day to un ravel the last shred of mystery sur rounding the truth of the universe we live in, we do know, from the second law of thermodynamics, that the clock cannot run backward, and that our universe is condemned to eventual total decay, to end, as T. S. Eliot has put it, not with a bang but
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VOL. 33, NO. 7, JUNE 1961
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