Limits of Science?. John E. Beerbower
practical consequences of technology, science has been remarkably unsuccessful. Upon a close examination, the lack of actual knowledge about and real understanding of the deeper fundamentals about reality seem to be among the more striking and surprising characteristics of modern science.
Let me quickly add that this fact is not bad news. To the contrary, it is a fundamental source of wonder—one consequence of mystery—and the stimulus of our continuing quest to discover. It is the reason that science is neither dead nor done, and probably never will be. For me, it is a cause for hope and motivation and an inspiration for creativity. How much we do not know is good news.
The reader may immediately wonder whether working scientists share the view here expressed about the limits of our scientific knowledge. Numerous important scientists have paid at least lip-service to the belief that what is yet to be discovered by science is far greater than what we currently know. Indeed, such an observation by one of the fathers of modern science, Galileo Galilei, working in the first half of the seventeenth century, has been recently paraphrased as follows: “[H]owever much we discover about the building-blocks of life, what we do not know will always be infinitely greater than what we know. All our brilliant detective work amounts to no more than a little gloss on the shining masterwork of creation.” Harry Eyres, “How to Cultivate a Growth Industry,” FT.com, October 15, 2010.
Similarly, over 300 years later, Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin wrote: “Even this room is teeming with things we do not understand. Only people whose common sense has been impaired by too much education cannot see it. The idea that the struggle to understand the natural world has come to an end is not only wrong, it is ludicrously wrong. We are surrounded by mysterious physical miracles, and the continuing, unfinished task of science is to unravel them.” A Different Universe (2005), p.218. And physicist David Deutsch has proclaimed: “Never before in the history of human thought has it been so obvious that our knowledge is tiny and our ignorance vast.” The Beginning of Infinity (2011) p.449. (Some such comments are just dramatic embellishment, of course. For example, utilizing the mathematical construct of infinity, Deutsch reasons that human knowledge is necessarily at the beginning of its achievements, since any specified point is, by definition, “at the beginning of infinity.” See, e.g., id., pp.164–95, 196.)
Many leading scientists, however, have expressed over the centuries quite different views. Several notables have declared that the tasks of science were soon to be largely completed. Such an attitude was arguably pervasive in the late nineteenth century. At the conclusion of that century, astronomer Simon Newcomb, physicist Albert Michelson and physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), concluded—and announced to the world—that the end of scientific discovery was sufficiently near that most of the remaining tasks would be more akin to cleanup than revolutionary advance. See, e.g., Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Inquiry (2012), p.19. Curiously, that attitude did not fully disappear despite the dramatic scientific upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. For example, John Horgan, then a senior science writer at Scientific American, published a book in 1977 called The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Based on interviews with many leading scientists, he advanced this thesis: “If one believes in science, one must accept the possibility—even the probability—that the great era of scientific discovery is over. …Further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental returns.” Indeed, one of the original celebrity-scientists, Carl Sagan, prophesized as recently as 1979 that the process of discovery was almost complete:
“This book is written just before—at most, I believe, a few years or a few decades before—the answers to many of these vexing and awesome questions on origins and fates are pried loose from the cosmos. …Had we been born fifty years later, the answers would, I think, already have been in. …In all of the four-billion-year history of life on our planet, in all of the four-million-year history of the human family, there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours.”Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science (1979), p.xv.
I am, in fact, of that very generation of which Sagan writes and, of course, we are now almost four decades into the future that he was imagining. And, this book discusses most of the same “fundamental” and “awesome questions” to which he refers:
“questions on the origins of consciousness; life on our planet; the beginnings of the Earth; the formation of the Sun; the possibility of intelligent beings somewhere up there in the depths of the sky; as well as, the grandest inquiry of all—on the advent, nature and ultimate destiny of the universe.”Id., p.xiii.
Yet, as you might have guessed, the answers are not yet in. Not even close. You younger readers were not, in fact, born too late to experience the wonder and mystery or to partake of the process of discovery. Indeed, I believe that the same will be true for your children (and theirs).
Since the late twentieth century, the most common attitude among scientists about the state of science seems to be to acknowledge the proposition that the search for the truth about the physical world may never result in a declaration of complete victory, but to believe that in general we are continually getting closer and closer. That view is one of the things that I hope to put at issue in the reader’s mind.
In recent years, some leading scientists have begun to raise the rather different question of whether science is actually capable of ever explaining everything about our world. For example:
Retired professor of mathematics William Byers asserts that there are “fundamental limits” to reason and human understanding, the fact of which was fully discovered in the twentieth century. He writes, “The discovery of … ‘limits to reason’ is in many ways the key scientific discovery of the twentieth century, one that our society has still not fully assimilated.” The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty (2011), p.4.
John D. Barrow, Research Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University, has expressed skepticism about the possibility of achieving a “theory of everything,” i.e., an underlying and unifying theory that would combine a theory of gravity (such as general relativity) and quantum mechanics and, then, all the rest of science: “The process of discovery could continue indefinitely either because the complexity of Nature is truly bottomless or because we have chosen a particular way of describing Nature which, while being as accurate as we desire, is none the less at best always but an asymptotic approximation that only an infinite number of refinements could make correspond exactly to reality. More pessimistically, our human frame and its evolutionary past may have placed real limits upon the concepts that we can accommodate.” Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (2005), p.2.
Cambridge University Professor of Cosmology Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Baron Rees of Ludlow, has speculated that “some aspects of reality—a unified theory of physics, or a full understanding of consciousness—might elude us simply because they’re beyond human brains… Perhaps complex aggregations of atoms, whether brains or machines, can never understand everything about themselves.” From Here to Infinity (2011), pp.110–11
Oxford University Professor of Mathematics Roger Penrose, in speculating about the ultimate “theory of everything,” has suggested that there might be a level of understanding on which Truth, Beauty and Good are all reflected. “There may be a sense in which the three worlds [mental perceptions, the physical world and the world of mathematical forms] are not separate at all, but merely reflect, individually, aspects of a deeper truth about the world as a whole of which we have little conception at the present time.” The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2005), pp.22–3. But, such a "deeper truth" is not likely to look like science as we know it.
The simple fact may be that there are things that are very real about the Universe in which we participate that are not susceptible to explanation by science as we know it. If so, there will be some important things that necessarily elude scientific explanation. This is an important issue. I shall end on (but not try to answer) the question, many pages from now, in a discussion of the science of human consciousness and the much