Everything we do in science is conditioned by the way we look at the world

And the way we look at the world is necessarily limited.

Science has undoubtedly answered many many questions over the past couple of hundred years. But, science may not be able to answer some of the most profound questions.

There are three stumbling blocks of the scientific method:

• cosmology (we cannot view the universe from the “outside”);
• consciousness (a phenomenon we experience only from within); and what they call “
• the nature of matter —roughly, the idea that quantum mechanics appears to involve the act of observation in a way that is not clearly understood.

Consequently, they say, we must admit that there are some mysteries science may never be able to solve. For instance, we may never find a “Theory of Everything” to explain the entire universe. This view contrasts sharply with the ideal that Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow expressed in the 1990s: “We believe that the world is knowable: that there are simple rules governing the behavior of matter and the evolution of the universe. We affirm that there are eternal, objective, extra-historical, socially-neutral, external and universal truths. The assemblage of these truths is what we call science, and the proof of our assertion lies in the pudding of its success.”

Is this notion of scientific triumphalism—the idea that, ‘Just give us enough time, and there are no problems that science cannot solve.’ We point out that this is in fact not true. Because there are many problems that we cannot solve.”

The debate comes down to the question: Is the world knowable through dispassionate scientific study, or hopelessly viewpoint-dependent and full of blind spots?

There’s one thing I know about science, and that’s that you can never be 100 percent certain about anything.

I think even Galileo would have agreed with that.

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