Understanding

Understanding means to describe the reality, our world. The better we can describe the reality, the more detailed, the more we understand. The more detailed we understand the better we can control and predict the future. Understanding starts by dividing the reality into parts, to divide the parts into smaller parts, to describe each of those parts, its function and the relations between those parts. By doing that we will discover that between many parts there are similarities and its functions are the same. Many of those identical functions we can describe accurate, in mathematical notation. We call this laws.

Understanding starts also with doing observations. Observations we do mainly with our eyes, but this includes also what we feel and smell. Observations are descriptions of the reality.
Those descriptions can be rather rough. At a more scientific level we try to describe our observations (measurements) as accurate as possible.

Understanding comes in two levels.

• The first level is what you can call: common understanding.
  Common understanding is the all the knowledge that is already known.
  This knowledge is available in standard text books and is generally accepted as being true.
  This is the type of understanding you learn at school. This level includes to learn the facts, to learn certain skills and to learn what we call The Laws of Physics .
• The second level is what you can call: academic understanding.
  This is the level of understanding where you yourself actively becomes involved.
  Academic understanding starts with yourself, by asking questions about what we know. You challenge common knowledge.
  Academic understanding includes: to improve our understanding, to find new facts, to define new theories, to make predictions, to challenge your understanding, to be critical and to accept errors or mistakes.
  

The major way to learn understanding and to communicate understanding is by using oral or written text.
In order to communicate effectively, text has to be clear .

The reader may ask him or herself the question if we ever will understand all and everything.
It is the opinion of the author that the answer is no. Part of this is because of our human limitations and part of what we try to understand is constantly changing. On the other hand, based on new discoveries and progress in general, we slowly understand more.

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