Friday, February 17, 2006
Science: A Skeptical Endeavor
"Science is essentially a skeptical endeavor, and over the long run the way science proceeds is to be skeptical of received knowledge, to be skeptical of authority. But there are many interesting questions that don’t lie in the realm of science. For example, is there a God? Or what is the nature of love? Or would we be happier if we lived to be 1,000 years old?"
"These are extremely interesting questions. They are important questions. They are questions that provoke us and stimulate us and express our humanity but they are not scientific questions. They cannot be falsified. They are questions that you cannot test definitively with experiment. So science has its limitations and there’s a great deal of life and human longing that lies outside of science. It’s a mistake to try to lump these questions in with science.
Science is very powerful but it has its limitations."
From "The Future of Science: A Conversation with Alan Lightman" published at LiveScience by Sara Goudarzi. Lightman, a physicist, novelist, and science writer, is the author of Einstein’s Dreams and the recently released The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-century Science.
"These are extremely interesting questions. They are important questions. They are questions that provoke us and stimulate us and express our humanity but they are not scientific questions. They cannot be falsified. They are questions that you cannot test definitively with experiment. So science has its limitations and there’s a great deal of life and human longing that lies outside of science. It’s a mistake to try to lump these questions in with science.
Science is very powerful but it has its limitations."
From "The Future of Science: A Conversation with Alan Lightman" published at LiveScience by Sara Goudarzi. Lightman, a physicist, novelist, and science writer, is the author of Einstein’s Dreams and the recently released The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-century Science.
