At National Public Radio, Marcelo Gleiser asks (April 6, 2011), “Can Scientists Overreach?”.Glieser, a theoretical physicist, offers an appreciation of Marilynne Robinson’s Yale lectures, offering:
For science to advance it needs to fail. The truths of today will not be the truths of tomorrow.
… Lord Kelvin remarked in 1900 that there were just “two little dark clouds” floating around Newton’s classical “law of gravity” physics. They were Michelson and Morley’s measurements of the velocity of light and the puzzling phenomenon of blackbody radiation. Kelvin was quite sure that these troublesome little clouds would shortly be blown away. Yet modern physics advances—relativity and quantum mechanics—derive from these two little dark clouds, not from the theory to which they were an annoying exception.