[Ian Iveson]

Chris Hornbeck
...
But science *must* exceed our current understanding, by
definition
a temporary thing. Our current understanding must be
considered as
nothing more than the best model available to us, and
*not* as a
revealed truth. Instead, our current model of _anything
and
everything_ is properly thought of as temporarily useful,
but
ultimately incorrect.
...
Science insists that we consider our models to be
fundamentally,
finally *wrong*, in ways that we don't yet appreciate.
We're a
modelling species - couldn't take a step without it - and
have
a compelling need to believe our models. But it's an
illusion.
Reality is forever beyond our grasp and reserved for the
gods
and goddesses.

Belief in our models, belief in gods and goddesses...
both
deep, deep within us, but not science.

Is this the dominant view of science in America?

I blame that lying cheating scoundrel, Popper.

It was not always so. There was a time, Bacon springs to
mind, when it was thought that science is different because
we can use it to change the world, and everytime it is
useful in that way, we know more. God doesn't make
capacitors, that's the big difference.

It is quite possible that science will redefine itself again
sometime. Maybe it already has but we don't know yet. It is
also quite possible IMO that science might be over, in that
we now know nearly all the science there can be...barring
the sifting through details. Arny could be right that all
audible differences in capacitors can be measured by
science, and it may be true that science can show that,
since everything is accounted for, there is nothing left for
it to measure.
It may also be true that those audible differences could be
understood more completely using some method currently
outside the scope of science as you or I define it.

Science alone doesn't make good musical instruments or
domestic audio systems, and neither does god. It is more
reasonable IMO to suggest that science will never fully
explain wire, in that when science as we currently define it
has fully informed itself about wire, there will yet be more
to know.

Some time in the future, some new formal method for the
pursuit of knowledge will reveal what it was that those
domestic audio systems were *for*. That may shed more light
on the wire thing.

Ian