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Re-evaluating the Place of Science in Evaluating Modernity Gabriel Motzkin Imagine that a spaceship were to land on earth sent by a superior civilization . The emissaries would descend, speaking of course perfect English, and would inform us that everything we thought we knew about science was wrong. We would immediately want to know whether this meant that the science we have is wrong, or whether science itself is a wrong way to go about interpreting reality. We are quite comfortable with the idea that the science we have may be wrong, although this notion of the relativity of science has not been popular at all times since the scientific revolution. The shock of discovering that Newton’s physics were not the ultimate paradigm for understanding the physical world, and the current unease stemming from the perception that we know nothing about most of the universe, the notorious dark energy and dark matter, have made us accustomed to the idea that a science may seem absolutely true at one time and invalid at another. We are comfortable with this notion of historical relativity because we also know that a revolution in scientific paradigm does not really invalidate the science of the previous epoch. Otherwise there would be no point to doing science, to using science as a way of trying to understand reality. We have to believe that something about what we learn from science is atemporally true, even if we are not always quite sure what it is. The question is what is meant by atemporal; whether a truth that is only true within one domain can be considered to be atemporally true. We will return to this question. The broader question is whether or not science is a wrong way to go about interpreting reality. Suppose that the universe is really a container for gum balls, a set of toys for a very big kid who is outside our known universe. Our findings would still be correct for everything inside the container, but would they be correct for what is outside the container? And more to the point, if there are quite other laws outside the container , would they invalidate the laws that are inside the container? To the first question: we have no way of knowing what is outside the container , but we can distinguish what must be true in all possible worlds, and what must not. Generally, the laws of logic are assumed to be true in all possible worlds, but are there empirical laws that must be true in all possible worlds? If for example a universe such as ours can exist only under very severe constraints, would that be true of all possible universes? Or can one imagine a universe that is similar to ours but exists without these constraints? I do not know the answer to that question, but I do have an answer to the second question, i.e., whether knowing what is outside the container would invalidate our findings for what is inside the container. The answer is: yes and no. Our findings would still be correct for the observations and the predictions that we have made, but we would understand them quite differently. We would understand them differently in two different senses: first, we would understand our physics differently, but we would also obtain a different picture of the world, and we would perforce have a different ontology and a different idea of how science can or does contribute to our civilization. There is a paradox inherent in the scientific enterprise, which is one of the key drives animating the modern age: On the one hand, we assume, together with Kant, that there must be laws that once discovered would explain everything. On the other hand, the nature of our drive for knowledge is such that we will assume that there is another framework than the one we have. Thus we assume both the possible completeness of science as a system and we assume that it is impossible that our knowledge enterprise can discover that completeness. I would like to argue that this paradox is a consequence of what, for want of a better term, could be called post-modernity. I do not refer by this obscure and over-used term to Derrida, Lyotard (remember him?), and their associates. I rather mean our idea of the significance of science since Darwin and Einstein. Previous to the changes that their theories signify, the basic paradox that confronted a philosophy of science...

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