Exploring The Limitations Of Science

 Science is a truly wonderful thing that has given us all of the technology which we posses today and which has enriched our lives with vast amounts of knowledge. But science is not omnipotent, and there are limits to what it can tell us about the universe and what it create for us.

In this article I will be exploring precisely what those limitations are - that is the ones which cannot be overcome rather than the limits of current science, which are many and varied and will probably have changed in some way by the time I finnish writing this article let alone by the time you read it - and I will also be asking whether there are other ways to answer the questions that science cannot answer for us.

The most obvious limits of science are those which relate to value. A biologist, for example, can tell you absolutely everything you could want to know about flowers, apart from which ones your wife would prefer on valentine's day.

Tied up with this is morality. A scientist can tell you whether it is possible to do something and how you would go about it, but they can't tell you whether it would be a good idea or not. And just as science can't decide for itself what it should do in all those controversial areas like cloning, it can't tell you how to live your life either. 

You can't look at very small subatomic things without in some way influencing or altering them. In some areas of quantum physics this is a very pronounced effect. An electron or a photon, for example, can behave as either a particle or as a wave. And the really strange bit is that if you set up an experiment to look for a wave, then that is what you find - and there is no particle. But if you set up your experiment to look for a particle then the wave dissapears and there is only a particle. Electrons are very obliging like that. A little bit too helpful actually, because this role of the observer in quantum physics actually causes problems when you want to know what electrons are doing when they aren't being experimented on.

This is a very complex issue and is actually the most uncertain one that I wanted to bring up. Is this an absolute barrier or not? There is just no definite answer to that question just yet.

In my opinion this is the most interesting point I wanted to address: science can only explain the interactions between things, and not the things themselves.

In an essay called 'What Is A Number?', published in 777 and other Qabalistic Writings, Aleister Crowley addresses this issue in a very eloquent way:

"We cannot define any word soever, except by identifying it with two or more equally undefined words. To define it by a single word would evidently be a tautology. We are thus forced to the conclusion that all investigations may be stigmatized as obscurum per obscurius. Logically our position is even worse. We define A as BC, where B is DE and C is FG. Not only does the process increase the number of unknown quantities in Geometrical progression at every step, but we must ultimately arrive at a point where the definition of Z involves the term A. Not only is all argument confined within a viscious cirlce, but so is the definition of the terms on which any argument must be based."

The problem here is that we are only explaining unknown things in terms of the way that they interact with other unknown things. This problem of definition also leads into the issue of the thing in itself. If we return to the example of an electron, you can see that a scientist can only explain an electron according to its effects. They can explain the way that it interacts with other things, the causal influence that it has in the wider universe - but what it an electron in itself? This can only be answered by breaking down the electron into parts, and explaining their interactions with each other. But then instead of having just one unknown thing, you have a whole zoo full of them. And eventually you will reach a point where you can't go any further. Either you hit the practical limits of the very small, or you find the very smallest thing which cannot be broken up into pieces.

A good scientist who really knows their stuff will always be able to tell you how. But if you keep asking why then eventually they will tell you - just because. Science can only answer the question of why something is or why something happens by explaining the prior causality which led up to it, and eventually they will hit up against the impenetrable brick wall of the limitation of causality.

For example, a scientist can very precisely explain to you why the planets move around the solar system as they do. It's because of gravity. But why is there gravity? Why is it set at the precise level that it is? Now I know that some scientists might say that they can explain why there is gravity in terms of tiny particles called gravitons, but once again that is really an explanation of how gravity works and not why it is there and the way that it is. You are basically only shifting the why question along a little bit, because you can just as well ask - why are there gravitons, and why do they behave the way that they do? That is exactly the same unanswered question, just rephrased to use the more precise terminology of graviton rather than gravity. Whatever answer that a scientist gives you to a question which begins with a why will be incomplete, and will really just be shifting the focus of the why rather than resolving it.

No matter what the topic, and no matter how well informed the scientist, if you sit them down with a 5 year old child that keeps asking why they will evantually run out of answers. In my opinion that is the biggest limitation of science - it is essentially a practical discpline for explaining how things work and how to make them do what you want them to do. It is just not set up to tell us why the universe is the way that it is.