I'm Back

What is the Nature of Science?

            All this time, I've had only one idea of nature and with that, only one view of what the nature of science was. Never before, did I know of the vast variations of how nature was perceived across the human mind, until reading all of these one page excerpts. The contradictions, justifications, and investigations of these ideas have stirred in me many questions that I can not at this moment find the answers to. I guess the ultimate question I would like to ask is, "Why do we try to find the ultimate truth of the universe?"

           I know that my question doesn't seem very productive, and that it may seem actually very pessimistic, an underestimate of our human intellect, and in opposition to the progression of human thought and knowledge. However, I ask it not to undermine the hard work of generations of great thinkers, who through trial and error have discovered most of what we know today to be true; but to condense the many feelings that have surged in me after reading these excerpts. For example, science is a study done through observation by the human brain. However, the knowledge we get from observing nature are limited because the lends through which we observe nature are limited by our predisposed filters. Our brain, as a product of nature, is itself limited. How can we expect a part of a whole to ever gain the complete understanding of that whole? We as humans are only products of nature, small pieces of the whole. Can we truly ever expect to understand nature, the whole, from our limited perception as only a part of that whole?

          On the one hand, scientists, through the study of the sciences, have helped to reveal so much of our world that for so long was hidden from us. On the other hand, science seems to be missing something, because no matter how hard, they try, scientist can't seem to explain certain aspects of nature that seem unreachable through our current ideas of scientific thought. when scientists study nature and use phrases such as "every thing that animals do, atoms do" (Feynman Six 20-21), they seem to disregard the other aspect of nature that the human heart and soul knows for a fact exists but the human brain and fields of study can not prove. But even through our heart-felt intuitions that there exists a part of nature that is unexplained by science, can we really say for a fact that such a part of nature really exists? On the one hand science has proven many laws that are true of nature. Are we to abandon the idea that every thing in nature can be proven by science, just because we are too limited to take the sciences to their higher levels? On the other hand, who are we to say that there exist higher levels?

          Our knowledge is limited and it always has been. It was through uncertainty and questions of faith and imagination that knowledge and facts were created. After reading P.A.M Dirac's "Logic or Beauty?", these realizations dawned to me; the fact that science and all its theories and tests of history were all the acts of faithful men, hopeful men, men who were able to imagine and leap out of the boxes that at their time were labeled "true" and "fact". This was the foundation of science as we know it. How did a study of wonder and curiosity about our natural world, become a study of strict measurements and tests, upon which failure means that the conjured idea was false or unscientific? There is so much about nature that we do not know and understand, yet in today's science we are so quick to reject ideas and theories that don't fit those of limited measurements and tests. And likewise we celebrate the conjured ideas as true and scientific because they fit our limited measurements and tests. For some reason, you and I, as human beings, want so badly to know the truth. We want to know what is unknown and hidden from us. But like I said before, as limited creatures, subjected to the capabilities of our human physical minds, why do we try and burden ourselves with questions that we might never be able to answer on our own?

         I do not, in any way, see the different sects of science, whether physical or social, namely sociology, psychology, biology, chemistry, or physics as separate from each other. They don't to me compete when it's time to discern what is true of the world. We as humans use the sciences as means to study our world to our greatest capabilities. This does not mean knowing everything that is to be known, but simple knowing all that we are capable of knowing. So I guess a temporary answer to my question would be how can we know what we are capable of knowing if we don't try?