Introduction: In search of Certainty

Man has always sought answers to questions, questions about himself, about the universe he lives in, about the past and the future. He has always sought certainty in a very very uncertain existence. The man living in the wilderness was never sure when he would be attacked by a wild beast and when his life would end. In his quest for certainty, man often went on a quest that taxed both his rational mind and his intuitive abilities. The moment he observed the heavens he noticed t that the position of stars across the night sky coincided with certain weather patterns. After astronomy, meteorology was probably one of the oldest of the sciences developed. One can find astounding astronomical feats in the brilliant calendars developed by the hoary Vedic civilization in India and the brilliant calendars of the Mayans and the other indigenous civilizations in South and Central America.

Often mankind has settled for certain theories which it thought explained everything or well, almost everything. The Greeks thought the Gods of Olympus controlled pretty much everything that happened on earth. The flash of lightning and thunder could always be explained away as the mighty thunderbolt of Zeus. The Aztecs thought that the Sun traveled in a boat around the Earth and for him to rise every morning, a human sacrifice was necessary. Different beliefs, different religions, different sects came one after the other. Every time man thought a certain belief system explained everything, a few daring people found flaws in it and went on to try to find systems which they felt explained everything. The quest has been going on and on.

The holy Roman Empire established Christianity and Holy Bible explained everything about the known universe. The papacy came to accept Ptolemy's model of the heavens (Now popularly called the Geocentric system) as the theory that explained the Universe in it's entirety. However, Nicholas Copernicus,Galileo Galeli challenged this,and proved that there were flaws in the heart of this theory. With the onset of Renaissance, the quest for knowledge from a rational perspective became the most prominent way of seeking the truth. Intuition was pushed to the background. Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes's works show a skepticism at everything. If it cannot be proven from known axioms, it cannot be held as true. With this system flowered science and maths. The western scientists, philosophers and mathematicians believed they took over from where the ancient Greeks had left off.

Thus came Newtonian mechanics. People looked upon the universe as a clockwork whose pieces can be dismantled by analysis and explained. There were immutable laws created by God, through which the universe functioned. 

People sought certainty in everything. Be it physics or politics or Maths. This was the case until Georg Cantor came on the scene.

A young mathematician who sought to find the immutable laws that god created for the universe, ran headlong into one of the monsters of Mathematics. Infinity!