Eternal Search: Hell or Heaven?


Benoit Mandelbrot (mathematician and the guy behind fractal geometry) was the kind of guy who didn’t stick to one topic; he liked to flit across subjects. Before you think of him as a rolling stone, check out how Mandelbrot saw himself in his memoir:
“In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the deceased sentenced to eternal searching are pushed to the deepest level of the Inferno. But for me, an eternal search across countless scientific fields beyond obvious connection managed to add up to a happy life. A rolling stone perhaps, but not an unresponsive one.”

If “eternal search” is what hell is all about, I don’t think it’s such a bad place at all! Unless, of course, the search is an impossible one (like finding the last digit of pi or something like that).

But most of the time, finding new questions to ask, the pursuit of those answers and then finding those answers is what makes life (and work) interesting. It is icing on the cake if along the way you get to draw parallels and join the dots across (seemingly) unrelated topics.

I am totally in Richard Feynman’s camp on this. His sentiment is captured very well in these lines from one of his interviews:
“One is presumptuous if one says, "We're going to find the ultimate particle or the unified field laws" or the anything. If it turns out surprising, the scientist is even more delighted. You think he's going to say, "Oh, it's not like I expected, there's no ultimate particle, I don't want to explore it"? No, he's going to say, "What the hell is it, then?"”

So why aren’t most people that way? I guess Feynman had the answer to that one too when he said:
“I don’t mind not knowing. It doesn’t scare me.”
Most people do mind if they can’t or don’t know, which is why Dante’s version of hell would indeed be applicable for most people.

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