Maya Lodish: Topic 7: Are There Limits to Science?

 When I try to conceptualize the idea of 
reaching a limit to science, two questions 
come to mind. Would we reach a concrete 
limit because the universe has a limit and 
we will have figured out all there is to 
know up to this endpoint? Asking a 
question from a different perspective on 
limits, one wonders if we will eventually 
reach a limit in terms of our own capacity 
to understand the world around us, perhaps 
it is full of complexities that we as a 
human race will always be unable to grasp? 
Approaching either of these limits of 
science seems unlikely to me. 
      As for the universe having a 
discrete amount of knowledge that we will 
be able to attain, I picture the universe 
as incredibly vast, with galaxies beyond 
ours of which we know little. Why do I 
have this image that there is so much left 
to discover that it is overwhelming to 
imagine understanding it all ?  Does it 
come from my imagination? As Friday's 
presenters pointed pout, imagination and 
speculation do not equal potential 
knowledge.
            As for the assumption that we 
will reach a finite capacity of our human 
ability to understand the universe, I 
can't picture this happening for the very 
reason that new discoveries in science 
always bring up new questions, and new 
ways of looking at these questions.  I 
would not argue that we will be able to 
understand all of the secrets of the 
universe, but I would assert that we will 
not stop attempting to understand the 
universe. Science is constantly in flux as 
new ideas are born which incorporate 
different sources of knowledge, both old 
and new. The nature of the questions we 
ask changes with the times, as our 
perceptions of the existing possibilities 
change. For instance, who would have 
imagined in the sixteenth century that we 
would be able to fly in airplanes, or put 
a man on the moon? I would guess that in a 
few thousand years, people will ask 
similar questions of us. It would be 
arrogant to assume that we will ever know 
all there is to know, and to me it would 
be a frightening world if there was no 
room for wonder. When I think of my view 
on the limits of science, what comes to 
mind is an image of the vastness of the 
universe, of how small I feel when I look 
into the night sky. I would almost not 
want us to ever reach a point when we stop 
wondering what secrets the universe holds. 
I fear that if we reached this point, we 
might lose our perspective as being a 
smaller part of a larger whole. The idea 
of unlimited knowledge carries with it an 
image of omniscient control of time and 
space, that is almost god-like and to me 
very unrealistic.