Texto. Science And The Unknowable Autor.

Martin Gardner

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY (LA) DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY COURSE: PHIL 458 (MODERN FIGURES: KANT) INSTRUCTOR: Ricardo J. Gmez

Science And The Unknowable

Summary
There are limits to science. Will science eventually know everything? We need to be very careful about what we mean by `everything'. There is a trivial sense in which humanity cannot possibly know all there is to know. We will never know how many hairs were in Plato's head when he died, the decimal digits of pi, or all possible theorems of geometry (even about triangles). We will never know all possible poems, novels, paintings, magic tricks or jokes because the possible combinations are limitless. Needless to say what we will be unable to know because of Godel's theorems; not even all the consequences of them. When physicists talk about TOEs (Theories of everything) they mean something far less trivial. They mean that all the fundamental laws of physics eventually will become known, perhaps unified in a single equation or a small set of equations. But even in this case, it will leave unknown billions of questions about the complexities that emerge from the fundamental laws. At the moment we do not know the nature of dark matter that hold together galaxies or whether there is life in other solar systems, or how consciousness emerge from the brain's molecular structure, or how the brain remembers. These unknowns could fill a book, but all of them are potentially knowable if humanity survives long enough. Too often in the past scientists have decided that something is permanently unknowable only to be contradicted a few generations later. But, infinity to the smallest and to the biggest poses limits. However small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. And, a similar infinity may go to the other way. Our universe may be part of a multiverse, and so on... without end. Even if the universe is finite in both directions and there are no other worlds, there are fundamental questions that can never be answered. For example, why are there quantum laws? Why there is something rather than nothing? And, why is the something structured the way it is? As S. Hawking put it: Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?. The question obviously can never be answered. H. Spencer in the opening pages of his "First Principles" (1894) in a part titled "The Unknowable" argues that recognition of the Unknowable is the only way to reconcile science with religion. The emotion behind all religions is one of awe toward the impenetrable mysteries of the universe. For him science expresses the knowable, religion the unknowable. For him, the most certain of all facts

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Texto. Science And The Unknowable Autor. Martin Gardner is that the power which the universe manifests to us is inscrutable. The human intellect is impotent in dealing with all that transcends experience. J. Barrow, a British astronomer, claims (1996) that there are limitations imposed by human intellectual capabilities (as well as by the scope of technology). There is no reason why the most fundamental aspects of the laws of nature should be within the grasp of human minds, which evolved for quite different purposes, nor why those laws should have testable consequences at the moderate energies and temperatures that necessarily characterize life-supporting planetary environments. There are further barriers to the questions we may ask of the universe, and the answers that it can provide us with. These are barriers imposed by the nature of knowledge itself, not by human fallibility or technical limitations. As we probe deeper into the interwoven logical structures that underwrite reality, we can expect to find more of these deep results which limit what can be known. Ultimately, we may even find that their totality characterizes the universe more precisely than the catalogue of those things that we can know. And Freeman Dyson ("Infinite in all Directions", 1988) says: "I hope that the notion of a final statement of the laws of physics will prove as illusory as a notion of a formal decision process for all of mathematics...If not, I would be disappointed. I would feel that the creator had been uncharacteristically lacking in imagination".

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