Where does science end?

Question

Being a physics student I have been behind many mysterious actions of nature, but when we remove one of these mysteries another pops up.

Does science end anywhere? Or are these mysteries just actions of god?

Answer 1

According to someone like Kuhn, physics is a social process that attempts to explain objective phenomena at a culturally acceptable level. Its 'mysteries' are just limitations of our understanding. We can consider them gifts from God, but we don't have to. We just like tying the feeling of purposefulness to something with a personality.

We never remove one of these mysteries, we only lay it aside. We offer an approximation to an explanation that feels right. But we never know when one of those approximations will prove to be inaccurate or to fail to produce an explanation because it is somehow malformed at some level we have not noticed.

When we find a wellspring of explanations (a dominant paradigm) we set about finding puzzles that can be solved with its products. And when it dries up, we are always left with more puzzles. So we go off and find a deeper source of explanations.

If we ever properly understood everything that has relevance to us, physics would stop. But we are probably constitutionally incapable of reaching this point. We can look inside our mathematics and find logical issues that we cannot resolve, and that we simply have to accept.

Mathematics is the only basis we have for communicating complex explanations. So our model of reality seems ultimately incomplete and partially broken. Like our paradoxes, our explanations may be reduced to cycling around an infinitude of potential solutions, none of them interesting, but we will certainly not find a complete model that works, based on a structure that cannot be completed.

Answer 2

Mmm... Several underlying assumptions, let's clarify the language:

• Science is just a type of knowledge (obtained using the scientific method, organized and systematic, etc.).
• Knowledge is an attribute of mind. Mental attributes cannot have frontiers or boundaries.
• Knowledge can be communicated, e.g. by printing it on books.

So, your question becomes...

Where does knowledge ends?

What do you mean? What is the number of scientific books at... this instant!? If you can learn everything written in books? If you can find the physical boundaries that knowledge occupies in your brain? If we have written everything? If there's a God sending you homework that never ends?

The universe is a huge, inconmensurable, epic, infinite set of energetic interactions, happening along huge intervals of time and space.

Knowledge is a tiny set of low quality pictures, of a tiny set of state representations of tiny sections of the universe at a tiny set of instants.

You are asking where does this tiny set of pictures end. Well, it has a lot of room to grow. But it is certainly limited not to books, but to all the pictures a single mind can do and store permanently, along a lifetime. It's not so much. We're inherently limited in multiple senses.

But there are approaches to knowledge. You can be a) a generalist, which basically means knowing a bit of several disciplines, or finally, knowing nothing about everything; b) a specialist, which is the opposite: a person who knows everything about nothing.

And there's a philosophical approach to gather more knowledge in life: you need more time in order to get more knowledge, but you have a limited lifetime. Well, you can live longer (which is not possible). Or you can live faster, which would be the same. That means developing, formally, techniques to do things faster, being extremely productive and healthy. Living longer is effectively and truly possible, by living faster.

Answer 3

In my probably wrong opinion, science ends when human curiosity ends, otherwise, we will try to find another thing to wonder and to understand, and even if we fail miserably we will keep on trying to find it.

Answer 4

Science end where things start getting non-causal.

First we had Newtonian physics which was clearly all about deterministic causality.

Then we came to quantum mechanics where we had probabilistic causality. So from determinism we arrived at uncertainity.

From certainity we end up where there is no cause. It just happens. That's non-causality or an acausal system in systems theory. Thats where sciense ends.

It ends in singularity weather black hole or computational.

It ends where we can't count anymore. Where we say its infinite. (Infinity is not a number)