Pivoting off a recent NYT piece on the (un)knowability of the laws of nature, physicist and natural philosopher Marcelo Gleiser revisits the core of his book The Island of Knowledge:
The main point is that it is naïve to believe we can have such a thing as complete knowledge of nature. There are two essential reasons for this belief. The first is simply that to make models of nature we need data. This data comes from tools of all kinds, from microscopes and particle detectors to telescopes and mass spectrometers. Any tool has limits of precision and range. Hence, we are always partially myopic to what goes on. Tools can and will improve. But some shortsightedness will always be unavoidable.
The second reason is that nature itself operates within certain limits: the speed of light and the finite age of the universe delimit how far we can see in space and limit causal relationships; quantum uncertainties delimit what we can say about the position and velocity of submicroscopic objects, and imply in nonlocal correlations through entanglement; math itself has its limits, as Kurt Gödel explores in his incompleteness theorems. The same is true with computers, from Alan Turing‘s undecidability theorem.
His bottom line:
Unanswerable questions invoke a feeling of humility, of how science is, in essence, an ongoing mosaic of ideas, a self-correcting narrative of what we can gather of physical reality. This is far from a defeatist view; in fact, it is liberating. What could be more exciting for us to realize that knowledge is an endless frontier?
The Dish 