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26 - From Gravity and Light to Consciousness: Does Science Have Limits?

from Part Three - On the Nature and Limits of Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2014

Leon N. Cooper
Leon N. Cooper
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
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Summary

In the last nine hundred years of scholarship and research a remarkable body of work has been created. But can this continue indefinitely? In spite of our great progress, we may ask if science has limits? And if science has limits, what are they?

The essay is based on a lecture given at a symposium celebrating the 900th anniversary of Bologna University in 1988.

It is with pride and pleasure that I speak to you on this nine hundred-year celebration, this anniversary of the signing of your Magna Carta: nine hundred years of intellectual activity, nine hundred years of continuous university existence. Of course, during these nine hundred years we expect a certain sufficiency of bureaucracy, excess of tenured faculty, occasional bad teaching, and some sleepy students. But these nine hundred years are also (I'll try not to be too effusive) a triumph of our all too human intellect – possibly alone in the universe – our struggle to understand, our struggle against brute nature and dark superstition. Is it out of place to paraphrase that cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, charmer? “Neverhave so many (all human beings) owed so much (of what we enjoy) to so few (ladies and gentlemen, that is us).”

You are probably thinking, “Can he be serious?” Yes, this is a grand occasion but doesn't he read the papers? Radiation, plutonium, ozone, and new viruses. Hasn't he heard of the dangers as well as the limits of science?

Type
Chapter
Information
Science and Human Experience
Values, Culture, and the Mind
 , pp. 225 - 246
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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References

Alighieri, D. (ca. 1321). The Divine Comedy, transl. Lawrence, Grant White, New York: Pantheon Books, 1948, Canto 34.Google Scholar
Gilbert, W. (1600). De magnete, transl. P., Fleury Mottelay as On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies, New York: John Wiley, 1893.Google Scholar
Faraday, M. (1918). Quoted in Mackay, A. L. (1977). The Harvest of a Quiet Eye: A Selection of Scientific Quotations, Bristol: The Institute of Physics, p. 56.Google Scholar
Maxwell, J. C. (1861). On Physical Lines of Force, Philosophical Magazine 4th series, four parts: I, vol. 11, pp. 161–175; II, vol. 11, pp. 281–291, 338–347; III, vol. 13, pp. 12–23; IV: vol. 13, pp. 85–95.Google Scholar
Santayana, G. (1925). Dialogues in Limbo, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.Google Scholar

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