Thus the issue of whether it is becoming harder or easier to understand everything that is understood depends on the overall balance between these two opposing effects of the growth of knowledge: the increasing breadth of our theories, and their increasing depth. Breadth makes it harder; depth makes it easier. One thesis of this book is that, slowly but surely, depth is winning. In other words, the proposition that I refused to believe as a child is indeed false, and practically the opposite is true. We are not heading away from a state in which one person could understand everything that is
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