May 31, 2003

The Sloan Foundation has lanched a new program on the limits to knowledge. (One of my own specialties. See my paper Insuperable Limits to Reduction in Biology.) Worth quoting:

"A hundred years ago it seemed we could measure nature more and more precisely, and that there were no limits on our knowledge," says physicist Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. But the last century also brought the first hints of fundamental, inherent limits on the knowable .. "We grow up thinking more is known than actually is," says Ralph Gomory, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Because that belief can trigger misconceptions about the natural world, Mr. Gomory launched the foundation's program in Limits to Knowledge. "It's hard to get researchers interested in the question of what's unknowable, since they are much more oriented to pushing the frontiers of knowledge." In genetics, for instance, it's becoming clear that knowing the entire genome of an organism will still not tell you all of the creature's physical traits. "I am asking where the rest of the information is," says Prof. David Thaler of Rockefeller University in New York City. "For now, we don't have any way even to quantify what fraction of all you'd like to know about an organism is in its genome."

To understand some of the reason why, read my paper. Odd thing, the article fails to mention the three body problem.

Posted by Greg Ransom