Bridges

Water

Colours

Waves

Kaons 

Science and technology have made tremendous progress in creating "rules" which seem to describe the way in which parts of the world operate.  Does this mean that from the basic laws of science, people will be able to predict everything that can happen?  Not at all.  In some ways the predictive power of science is quite limited.

Knowing the laws of games like cricket, chess, rugby football, and so on, is not a sufficient condition to predict any but the simplest events.  If you have not seen an actual game. you would never from the laws be able to imagine a beautifully timed cover drive, sending the ball almost effortlessly to the boundary.  You would never be able to imagine a brilliant sacrifice.  You would never be able to imagine an excitingly executed try.

Some "ancient Greeks" thought that everything was made of air. earth, fire and water.  We now think they were "wrong".  Prout, in 1815, guessed that all atomic weights were integral multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen.  Because the multiple isotopes had not been created, Prout was proved "wrong".  But perhaps these people had the right idea.  Perhaps the whole world is made up of a few kinds of matter.  These people were predicting without the necessary data.  Peter Medawar said that science is "the art of the soluble".

The difference between the laws of science and the laws of games is that the laws of science, as created by people, are often very neat and tidy, or elegant if you prefer.   Is this because the world is basically neat and tidy underneath, or because some people wish to find order in it?

In any case, the existence of simple rules clearly does not prevent extremely complex behaviour from occurring.  Just because we are made of atoms, we are not in any way diminished.  You don’t say that chess is "only" pushing some small pieces of wood around on a big piece of wood, and life-forms aren’t "only" atoms.

The predictive power of science is also limited by the boundaries of the layers of structure.  When Schrödinger created his famous equation, there was not, and never has been, an outburst of people predicting the existence and properties of complex molecules such as buckminster fullerine, let alone DNA or insulin.  And that’s within the same layer.  It’s not even easy, or perhaps posible, to predict the properties of atomic nuclei from the properties of quarks and gluons.

Science is sometimes considered to be "reductionist", in that it reduces complex behaviour to a few simple rules.  This isn’t quite true. It doesn’t reduce the behaviour: it enables us to understand it with a reduced set of rules instead of having to memorize every single event.  We lose nothing when science "explains" something.  We still have the thing we previously thought beautiful or interesting, but we also have another way of looking at it.

We don’t feel that something has been lost because a playwright wrote a play about some people, or because an artist painted them into a picture.  The originals remain unchanged, but we now have some new ideas about them.