These all seem to express or imply cases of scientific problems that cannot be solved - questions that are statable within a theory, but that the theory itself tells us cannot be answered.Īs John Hartle says in his paper "Scientific Knowledge from the Perspective of Quantum Cosmology," we must first be quite clear about what kinds of limits are at issue here. Some frequently cited examples are Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem in mathematical logic, Alan Turing's results about uncomputability, Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum physics, and Albert Einstein's speed-of-light limit to signal transmissions. Twentieth-century science and mathematics seem to be riddled with limitative results. Are there limits to what we can know through science? This question formed the basis for an interesting collection of 10 papers, mainly by physicists and biologists, which came out of a 1995 conference held in Abisko, Sweden.
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