In “The limits of knowledge: Things we’ll never understand” (New Scientist 09 May 2011), Michael Brooks offers to explain “From the machinery of life to the fate of the cosmos, what can’t science explain?”
We live in an age in which science enjoys remarkable success. We have mapped out a grand scheme of how the physical universe works on scales from quarks to galactic clusters, and of the living world from the molecular machinery of cells to the biosphere. There are gaps, of course, but many of them are narrowing. The scientific endeavour has proved remarkably fruitful, especially when you consider that our brains evolved for survival on the African savannah, not to ponder life, the universe and everything. So, having come this far, is there any stopping us?The answer has to be yes: there are limits to science. There are some things we can never know for sure because of the fundamental constraints of the physical world. Then there are the problems that we will probably never solve because of the way our brains work. And there may be equivalents to Rees’s observation about chimps and quantum mechanics – concepts that will forever lie beyond our ken.
So now we come up against the ultimate failure of materialism.
Materialists assume we are an accident, so there is no reason we were intended to know the facts. Therefore, we can suppose anything we want if it does us and our descendants no harm. How about
Importantly for you and me, we wouldn’t be here without it: the uncertainty principle provides our best explanation for how the entire universe came into being. That’s because uncertainty shatters the notion that anything ever has exactly zero energy. So the universe could have come into existence spontaneously when its energy state momentarily flickered away from zero. Heisenberg himself pointed out that uncertainty in time measurements destroys common-sense notions of cause and effect – which perhaps makes the idea of something appearing from (possible registration wall)
Besides which
Perhaps the biggest workaround will have to be in our search for a “theory of everything”. The most promising candidate is string theory, which conjures what we think of as nature’s fundamental forces and particles from the vibrations of tiny bundles of energy. Unfortunately, string theory only works if there are extra, unreachable dimensions of space. These dimensions are, string theorists suggest, “compactified” – rolled up too small for us to be able to interact with them. nothing a little easier to swallow. (possible registration wall)
Rube (yelling while escorted out): People have gone to jail for promoting this kind of thing where private money instead of tax money was involved.