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From: RSchatte@aol.com [Rebecca Keith]
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 16:25:38 EST
Fwd Date: Tue, 03 Feb 1998 18:39:05 -0500
Subject: Some scientists don't shut eyes to the 'unknowable'

http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/nation/98/02/02/unknowability.2-2.html

11:15 PM 1/31/1998
Discovery
Some scientists don't shut eyes to the 'unknowable'
Researchers attempting to confront the limits to human wisdom

By SARAH BOXER
New York Times

Many scientists are not fond of the idea that there are things in
the universe beyond their grasp.

They do not even like the word "unknowable" and prefer to use the
term "intractable" instead. They consider the idea of
unknowability an admission of defeat or an invitation for an
attack on science.

Recently, though, some scientists have made unknowability their
business. Last summer the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave some
$1.5 million in grants to researchers in different fields --
economics, oceanography, historical linguistics, computer
science, population genetics, cell biology, anthropology and the
history of science -- to take stock of what is known, unknown and
unknowable.

"We are all taught what is known, but we rarely learn about what
is not known, and we almost never learn about the unknowable,"
Ralph Gomory, the president of the Sloan Foundation, wrote in
Scientific American in 1995. "Because of such lessons, we grow up
thinking more is known than actually is," and we do not recognize
the unknowables for what they are.

That is why the average gambler always loses to the average
casino owner. "The gambler attempts to predict the individual and
unpredictable spins of the roulette wheel," Gomory wrote, while
"the owner concerns himself with the quite predictable average
outcome."

This is not the first time the depths of unknowability have been
plumbed. As John Barrow, an astronomy professor at the University
of Sussex in England, writes in Impossibility: The Limits of
Science and the Science of Limits (Oxford, coming in April),
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle showed that you cannot
simultaneously know the position and momentum of a subatomic
particle.

Einstein's cosmic speed limit put a cap on the transmission of
information in the universe. And Goedel's theorem proved that any
mathematical system that is powerful enough to be interesting
will contain statements that cannot be proved true or false
inside that system.

More recently, chaos theorists have looked at phenomena like
dripping faucets and long-term weather patterns, and shown how
the tiny inevitable fluctuations in those chaotic systems quickly
snowball in unpredictable ways. Complexity theorists have shown
that complicated systems, like embryos and economies, are more
than the sum of their parts.

Now unknowability itself seems to be coming of age, or at least
coming into some money.

So what is an example of something unknowable? Take the diet of a
given person living in a village in the year 1300. "You may know
on average what his diet was," said Jesse Ausubel, the program
officer of the Sloan Foundation. "But you cannot say what he ate
on Dec. 15, 1300."

The same goes for future climates. You may be able to say what
the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere will be in
2030, but you cannot know what it will be in New York City.

The study of unknowability in each discipline offers a glimpse of
how different scientists approach the boundaries of their own
fields.

In anthropology, the limits to knowledge can be determined by
practical barriers. If a group of people refuses to perform a
ritual while an outsider is watching, that ritual is, in a sense,
unknowable. In science history, the knowledge about a problem can
be limited by illegible handwriting or some other fluke.

No one will ever know, for example, exactly how Fermat proved his
last theorem because, by his own admission, the margin of his
page was "too narrow to contain" the solution.

In ecology, unknowability is a problem of scale. If, for example,
one wants to see the effect of environmental changes on a forest,
one literally has a choice between looking at the forest and
looking at the trees.

Simon Levin, a biologist at Princeton University who has received
part of the Sloan's unknowability grant, said that when you look
at the climate's effect on the forest, "not every detail of every
tree is important." What the study of unknowability can help
reveal is how much detail you can leave out about individual
trees without compromising your knowledge of the whole forest.

Or say you are starting with a single tree. As Levin points out,
each tree will react differently to environmental changes and to
other trees, and that tree's reaction in turn will have an effect
on the climate. So how much can you extrapolate from that one
tree about the whole forest?

When it comes to unknowability in historical linguistics, time is
the enemy.
To name the unknowable is to name a date beyond which the past is
irretrievably lost.

According to Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist at Cambridge
University who is another recipient of a Sloan grant, the first
direct evidence of language is around 3000 B.C., because that is
when writing began, in the Near East. So if you want to see what
language was like before then, you run up against the boundary of
what is knowable and not knowable.

By comparing contemporary Indo-European languages (including
English, Spanish, French and German), linguists have
reconstructed what they call proto-Indo- European, a precursor to
all Indo-European languages, Renfrew said. That takes us back to
5,000 years ago.

But to push back the date further requires help from other
fields. For example, Renfrew said, we know that languages spread
when populations shift.
That means archaeology should say something about language. And
DNA studies tell us a great deal about how populations are
related, going back some 30,000 years.

The problem is, "it is difficult to correlate data from different
fields," Renfrew said. "There is always the possibility of
dubious interpretations," which gets more and more likely the
further back in time you go. That's why most linguists accept
that we can see back at least 5,000 years, but few think we can
detect the echoes of a hypothetical first language some 80,000
years ago.