Wanting to Know Everything

When I was a kid, I wanted to learn about everything.

I don't mean that in a cute way. I would sit in the library genuinely annoyed that there was so much to know and no way to just see it. I wanted to look at all of human knowledge at once, get a feel for the whole thing, and then pick where to zoom in. Some kind of table of contents for everything that exists.

That didn't exist then. It still doesn't, really. Noosaga is my attempt to build it.

The Encyclopedia Problem

Encyclopedias were the obvious first attempt. In theory they contain all of human knowledge, organized into volumes. As a kid that sounded great.

But actually trying to use one to get an overview of things? Terrible. You could look up "quantum mechanics" and get a dense article about it, but there was no way to back up and ask the bigger question: what are all the different approaches people have taken to physics? How do they relate to each other? What came first? Encyclopedias are alphabetical. They're flat. There's no hierarchy. No sense of scale.

They answer "what is this thing?" but not "what kinds of things are there?" And it was that second question I actually cared about. I didn't want to read about one topic. I wanted to understand how all the topics fit together.

Wikipedia Changed Everything (Almost)

I should say upfront that Wikipedia is wonderful. It's one of the best things humanity has produced, and Noosaga leans on it heavily for fact-checking and grounding. Frameworks get verified against Wikipedia. Dates, names, relationships. It's a core part of how we avoid the hallucination problem.

But Wikipedia has the same structural issue encyclopedias do, just at internet scale. It's millions of articles linked together, and you can search for things or click around, but there is no overview. There's no page you can go to that says: here are the main branches of human knowledge and here's what's inside each one. The only real way to navigate Wikipedia is to already know what you're looking for, or to just start clicking and see where you wind up.

And that kind of random link-surfing is honestly great. You start reading about the French Revolution, somehow end up on bread prices in 18th-century Paris, and twenty minutes later you're deep in an article about thermodynamics. I love that. But it's not the same thing as structure. You can't use it to survey a whole domain or figure out where the gaps in your own knowledge are, or compare two fields side by side.

The Thing I Actually Wanted

What I wanted, and honestly still want, is something that sits between an encyclopedia and a university course catalog. Not every detail about every topic, but the shape of the topics. A view from high up.

Like: what are the major branches of knowledge? Within biology, what are the subfields? Within each subfield, what are the competing schools of thought, and how have they changed over time? Where are people still arguing? What's settled? You can get fragments of this kind of overview from good textbook introductions, or from talking to professors who've been in a field long enough to have the whole map in their head. But nobody had ever put it all in one navigable place.

And the reason nobody had done it is pretty obvious when you think about it. You'd need someone with deep familiarity across hundreds of fields, who could identify the frameworks in each one, map the relationships between them, and then keep updating the whole thing as fields evolve. That's not a realistic job for any person or team. There are just too many fields and they're too different from each other.

What changed is that open-source language models got good enough, in the last few years, to produce rough structural overviews of fields that hold up after verification. Not perfect. But close enough to build on. For the first time, the scale of the problem became tractable.

Who This Is For

I built this for the kid I was, sitting in that library, wishing he could just see everything at once. But it turns out the audience is wider than that.

If you're a student trying to figure out what to study, this is useful in a pretty direct way. Picking a major is one of those decisions with long consequences that you're expected to make with almost no information. You take a couple intro courses, talk to whoever's around, and hope for the best. With Noosaga you can actually browse. Look at what cognitive science contains before committing to it. Compare it to neuroscience. Realize the questions you're most interested in might belong to a field you hadn't considered.

If you're someone who's been out of school for years but never lost the itch to learn broadly, this is for you too. Maybe you're a software engineer who's always wanted to understand what philosophers actually argue about. Maybe you studied history and keep hearing about complexity theory without knowing what it really involves. The atlas is built for that kind of wandering. Browse through fields the way you'd walk through a museum, following whatever catches your eye.

And then there are people who just want to appreciate how much is out there. I think this might be the most underrated reason to look at something like this. Somewhere right now, there are people who've spent their whole careers on the philosophy of time, or insect flight biomechanics, or the history of mathematical notation. Every single one of those fields has internal debates, competing frameworks, its own long story. Just seeing the range of it, the sheer variety of things humans have thought carefully about, is something I find genuinely moving.

I'm still that kid who wanted to learn about everything. I just finally have the tools to start building the map. And if you're reading this, so do you. Every time someone explores a field, proposes a correction, or flags something that looks wrong, the atlas gets a little better. This isn't a finished product you consume. It's a map we're drawing together.

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Start exploring: Browse all fields | Classical Mechanics | Literary Theory

Learn the interface: Getting Started

Read next: Every Field Has a Map You've Never Seen. What it means to see the structure of a field before you start learning it.