Karen J. Chung: Topic 7: Are There Limits to Science?

	Speaker's Corner Group 7 explored the question of 
whether science has limits.  The first presenter gave 
us the idea of visualizing the limits of science 
geometrically.  If we can picture science as a line 
segment, then science must have limits because it is 
finite.  On the other hand, if science is more like a 
line that extends infinitely in both directions, then 
science has no limits.  He suggested that we think of 
science as a ray, with a fixed origin but extending 
infinitely in one direction from there.  Then, 
science is in some ways limited and in other ways 
not.  For example, while science is not limited in 
the fields of chemistry and biology, science may be 
limited from explaining others, such as what happens 
after death.
	Karen Thickman explained several conceptual 
systems of science and their ramifications in terms 
of limits.  Realism defines science as distinct (not 
influenced by individuals or their activities), 
concerned with truth and the universal laws of 
nature, and existing in a platonic realm.  Realism 
implies that there is only a finite amount of 
knowledge, because there will eventually be a point 
at which everything in this platonic realm has been 
explored and is known.  The two main objections to 
realism are observation, which relates to the limits 
implied by the uncertainty principle, and 
interpretation.  According to Contextual Realism, 
science is truth but is comprised of diverse views 
and perspectives held by the scientific community.  
In this sense, science is limited by its dependence 
on human perspective.  Finally, in Strong Theory, 
also called Contextualism, science can not produce 
the truth because all methods used and facts produced 
are contextual.  So by this theory, science is 
limited by the scope of the human imagination, 
therefore the limits of science will also correspond 
to the limits of humanity.
	The next section in the presentation was on 
Astrophysics and space exploration, and whether or 
not there is a finite amount of knowledge in the 
universe.  On the side of unlimited exploration, the 
scope of the universe may by so vast that there will 
always be something left to learn about.  As an 
example, the big bang theory of the universe claims 
that an "infinitesimally small and infinitely dense" 
mass exploded into space to produce the universe.  
Although in some ways the big bang theory is 
consistent with what we know about the universe 
today, there are a few points against it.  Scientists 
can not explain why the Hubble Constant (which refers 
to the uniform rate of the expansion of the universe) 
has been measured at different values, or why there 
is a discrepancy between the amount of mass that 
existed at the time of the big bang and the amount in 
the universe now (this is explained using "dark 
matter," which supposes that there is mass that 
exists in the universe that we do not know about).  
We can see that there are complications in using 
classical laws of physics to interpret the big bang 
theory of the universe.  On the other hand, 
scientists have proposed a Unified Theory, which 
links the two branches of quantum mechanics and 
special relativity to form a quantum theory of 
gravity.  According to the "no-boundary proposal," 
this link would make physics both complete and 
infinite, as a circle.
	By contrast, the case for limited exploration 
states that we can not equate human imagination with 
potential knowledge.  In other words, just because we 
can imagine that something exists, does not mean that 
it is out there.  In this case, imagination becomes 
mere speculation, and not science.  If science must 
be limited to exploration of what is empirical and 
observable, then the scope of knowledge must be 
finite.  According to Harwit's View, we can view the 
acquisition of knowledge as a curve which will peak 
and then eventually decrease, because the limits on 
knowledge that are set by the universe will cause the 
number of discoveries that can be made to decrease.  
An objection made to this argument is the "Star Trek 
factor," which asks how we can be nearing the end of 
a limited amount of knowledge when we have not even 
reached the levels of science and technology in 
science fiction, but this argument is again based on 
the mistake of equating imagination with potentially 
concrete knowledge.