Mind... Right before our eyes

I read with a lot of curiosity and some excitement, in my December 2008 issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/dec08/7024), that a group of researchers have "discovered" a fourth passive circuit element (the first three being the resistor, the inductor, and the capacitor). One of the things that struck me most about this article, besides the admittedly-somewhat-geeky excitement over the actual existence of an entirely new passive circuit element, was the fact that this device has actually always been there, working in small ways in even the simplest circuits. As the author explains in the article, the influence of "memristance" (the original theorizer's name for the relationship between charge moving through a circuit and the magnetic flux surrounding that circuit) obeys an inverse-square law so that it is a million times more important at the nanometer (10 to the -9 power) scale as it is at the micrometer (10 to the -6 power) scale. Therefore, even though it was there all the time, we haven't really begun to detect its influence until recently, as we've continued the push to build smaller and smaller electronic circuits. (Moore's Law, postulated in the 1950's, stated that number of transistors on a chip would double every two years, though even back then it was foreseeable that physical limits must someday be reached.)


It's really sad and laughable at the same time, how arrogant we humans are, right in the face of all of this evidence of our minute level of understanding of the universe. In fact, as one of my mentors is fond of pointing out, the more we learn the more we (should) realize how much there is that we DON'T know.


Even without all of the human short-comings of propensity for error and limitations of memory, it strikes me as incredible that we trust in our selves at all. In fact, one of our main strengths lies in our ability to ask others around us to help catch our mistakes. (I think this is part of what Proverbs 12:15 means when it says that "the way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but he who listens to advice is wise".)

The world has an on-going, persistent lie that there is no such thing as relative truth, and yet at the same time (illogically!) shouts that we can be confident in our own abilities, that we can somehow achieve a state of security if we just try hard enough on our own.

How much truth do we miss every day because we were too busy or too arrogant to look for it, even though it's right before our eyes?