Publication Day: Excerpt 4 from The Edge of Knowledge/The Known Unknowns.

Final Excerpt: The road to wisdom

“Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is,

and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated

through and through by science and which is both whole and real.

We cannot turn it into a game simply by taking sides.”

Jacob Bronowski

Recognizing that we don’t have all the answers is the beginning of science, just as it is the first step on the road to wisdom. That may seem trite, but it is worth repeating at the current time, as popular discourse appears more and more to be governed by ideological certainty than by rational inquiry.

If ideology intrudes on the process of science, the inevitable gaps in our knowledge can be exploited by those who wish to further their own ends, whether they’re economic, political, or religious.

We are told that science will never explain love or that science cannot possibly present an accurate or complete picture of this portion of reality because it has been performed by individuals who themselves are flawed, for one reason or another—by their birth identity, their politics, or their position of wealth or stature—and that we need to root out or ignore their contributions if we are to achieve real progress.

These are games, pure and simple. It takes remarkable conceit to claim that science will never explain this or that because it implies that you know enough to know what we can never know. Equally, who is to decide who is or is not worthy enough to contribute to the process? Science proceeds by dialectic, where all ideas are subject to debate and attack, and bad ideas get rooted out precisely because the community as a whole has goals that transcend the specific penchants of individual scientists.

Motivated on the left by social justice concerns or on the right by conservative intransigency, pundits and politicians alike claim to know what is best for others as well as to know exactly what the causes of society’s current ills are. They think they can somehow do this without asking skeptical questions or investigating the actual data.

Even universities, which should be the last bastion of skeptical questioning and open inquiry, are quickly becoming overburdened by issues of political correctness and claims of systemic ills that govern what can be said and who can say it. Sadly, the ability to question any statement, a sign of interest in learning and the hallmark of the scientific method, is too often stifled because concerns about offense, marginalization, and victimhood are becoming paramount.

My concern here is not university politics, however. I began this epilogue with a quote from one of my intellectual heroes, Jacob Bronowski, because I care about science and its ability to help us better understand nature and ourselves, to help create technologies that can improve our lives and our environment, and to better predict future alternatives.

Four hundred years of modern science have brought us to where we now stand, but where we go from here will not just depend on how we use our existing knowledge, but how we build new understanding of the world around us.

In this regard, recognizing our current limitations is an essential first step. Being able to quantify uncertainty, which is nothing other than explicitly understanding what you don’t know so that you can determine the impact of that lack of knowledge on what we can say with confidence about nature, is probably science’s greatest strength. As I have often said, not understanding something is not evidence for God or human frailty. It is just evidence of not understanding. And it should be an invitation to explore and learn.

Humility and honesty demand that we be clear about the limitations of our knowledge, but we shouldn’t be shy about this. We should celebrate it. There remain remarkable mysteries to be uncovered.

As I remarked at the beginning of this book, focusing on the edge of knowledge has provided me an opportunity to explain how far we have come, but it also allows me to present some guideposts for the future. When I was a teenager, I remember reading a book by Richard Feynman called The Character of Physical Law. I had always been interested in science, but that book made it clear to me for the first time that the really interesting questions in physics had not all been answered yet. It was an invitation to me, and it presented a challenge and an opportunity to try and move on to the next step. I don’t presume that this book will have the same impact on some young person today, but I hope it does. Indeed, that is why I have written it.