The Purpose of Knowledge Creation

Philosophers have debated the purpose of knowledge creation for millennia especially when it comes to knowledge of the physical world which we call science. A good explanation is a solution to a problem and some of the problems that are solved include predicting what will, would or could happen under certain conditions. When philosophers and scientists in the early 1800s guessed that there was a relationship between electricity and magnetism it took experiments by Danish physicist Hans Christian Austet but neither he nor Michael Faraday who took up this mantle can possibly have imagined how their theories would solve today's problems. The fundamental means by which an electric current produces the repulsive force on magnets is essentially unchanged since 1831. Gravity cannot be substituted for