The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals

The Science of Can and Can't: A Physicist's Journey through the Land of Counterfactuals
Can the fundamental nature of matter really be lawlessness? Can the stability and order of the world be but a temporary dynamic equilibrium achieved in a corner of the universe, a short-lived eddy in a chaotic current?
Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth.
There is no picture- or theory-independent concept of reality. Instead we will adopt a view that we will call model-dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations. This provides a framework with which to int
... See moreIn other words, science is the discovery that the secret of knowledge is being open to learning, not believing that we have already tapped into ultimate truth. The reliability of science is based not on certainty but on a radical lack of certainty.