Jane Parkin: Topic 7: Are There Limits to Science?

	I thought Group 7 did a good job of presenting 
the issue of whether or not science is limited.  I 
really had no conception of what this issue involved, 
and their presentation showed me the issues and how 
science might be limited and by what.  
	Seth's Ray Analogy was amazing.  I think the idea 
that some science is limited and some is not should 
be a very natural one and that it is also very true. 
It would seem to be a compromise between the two 
sides of the issue that the group was presenting.  It 
would also seem logical that some areas of science:  
perhaps biology or earth science, might be limited 
because they involve finite sources:  life and the 
earth, whereas others are infinite:  chemistry and 
astronomy perhaps, because in chemistry scientists 
can create new elements, and in astronomy it is quite 
likely that the people of the earth will not live 
long enough to see events that occurred on the other 
side of the cosmos, because we cannot travel fast 
enough, and the light will take too long to reach 
here.
	Much of the presentation considered the question 
of what a limit is and what science is.  While I 
thought it was worthwhile to consider this in some 
depth, because often what people think of an issue is 
based on their own personal defintion of the ideas 
involved in an issue, the group may have spent less 
time on that and had some time to discuss at the end.  
The different perspectives of science were 
interesting in that they led to some very different 
ideas of what the limits on science were- one was 
limited simply by the fact that there is a finite 
amount of knowledge, and the other was limited by the 
human imagination and acception of ideas.  Overall, I 
liked this presentation and thought the case studies 
gave good examples of how science may or may not be 
limited.