Sci Am: Is Science Doomed to Leave Some Questions Unanswered?

Cosmos, Quantum and Consciousness: Is Science Doomed to Leave Some Questions Unanswered?

Dan Falk

Gleiser, Frank, and Thompson highlight three particular stumbling blocks: 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.”

What Gleiser and his colleagues are critiquing, he says, 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 that is in fact not true. Because there are many problems that we cannot solve.”