Ha, if anything LSD has reduced my appetite for scientific knowledge since there is potentially an infinite number of facts and I can't possibly know them all.
Well, to be specific:
Science isn't really an amalgamation of facts, as it is commonly interpreted by popular culture. It's an ongoing process of inquiry into the underlying nature of reality through systematic, verifiable methods.
The phrase "scientific fact" is actually an oxymoron, because to be labeled as such, it would have to generate reproducible results greater than an infinite number of times, which is impossible.
Ok, now I'm gunna go off on a little tangent here. What you said was short-sighted, and I'll try my best to explain why.
The existence of an infinite number of "facts" would mean very little, even if it were true.
To understand why, we need to be very precise about how we define "infinite". You see, non-finite conditions fall into 2 principle categories: discretely infinite, and continuously infinite.
A discretely infinite set is an an amalgamation of individual, differentiable quantized units. Whereas a continuously infinite set is not built from indivisible units, but instead can be subdivided without boundaries (a much more complicated case).
An excellent example of a discrete infinite system is human language: you can have a 2 word sentence, a 3 word sentence, even a 500 word sentence; but you can never have a 3.5 word sentence, or a 2.777777778 word sentence, etc.
So now to my actual point:
It's not impossible to make sense out of an infinite number of facts, because a "fact" is a quantized unit. You can have 1 fact, or a billion facts, but you cannot have 1/2 of a fact, or 1/3 of a fact, etc. This is definitely a
discretely infinite set.
With a discretely infinite system, you can logically exploit the basic indivisibility of its unit constituents to elucidate the overall structure of the system.
Think about a fractal for a second. A fractal is a discretely infinite system: it is composed of basic, indivisible units that exist in a relationship of unbounded recursion. If you've ever seen a picture of a cool fractal, you should understand what I mean: you don't have to view the fractal structure in it's non-bounded entirety to get the gist of the picture, you only need to see a small portion of the entire infinite recursion to understand the pattern: because you can see how the indivisible units within the pattern are related.
In the same way: even if mankind possessed a body of facts that was growing without boundary, it would not be necessary to know every single fact to get a fairly thorough understanding of the structure of reality. Provided that you are able to find a mechanism through which the facts are related, you can condense the entire infinite system into one single communicable idea.
The goal of scientific progress is not to amass charts, tables, and books of raw information. The goal is
simplification: ie, how can we pull all this random crap together into some sort of basic, communicable notion?
Sorry to have gone off on such a tangent here, but I felt compelled to demonstrate that 'knowledge' is very different from 'information', and the volume and/or complexity of information seldom dictates the level of difficulty inherent to understanding it.
