The Limits of Science - The Romanes Lecture by Lord Rees at Oxford University

The Romanes Lecture is the annual public lecture of the Oxford University. A most distinguished public figure from the arts, science or literature is invited by special invitation of the Vice-Chancellor.

The lecture was created in 1891, following an offer by John Romanes of Christ Church to fund an annual lecture, and the first lecture was given in 1892 by William Gladstone.

Professor the Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS delivered his lecture on November 2, 2011.

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Synopsis
Telescopes reveal the remote universe; accelerators probe the subatomic world.

Thanks to such instruments, astronomers have established, in outline, how our cosmos has evolved from a still-mysterious beginning more than 13 billion years.

Billions more years - and perhaps even an infinite time - lie ahead of it but 99 percent of scientists focus neither on the very small nor the very large, but on the even greater complexities of our everyday world.

Materials science, biology and the environmental sciences proceed apace, revealing remarkable insights, and opening up an ever-widening range of applications, looking at both opportunities and threats.

We live on an ever, more interconnected and crowded planet, where each person who is empowered by transformative technology, is also making increasing demands on the world's resources.

There is a widening gulf between what science enables us to do, and what is actually prudent or ethical to do.

The Earth has existed for 45 million centuries but this is the first when, in our arrogance, one species, ours, can determine the long-range planetary future.

The stakes are high; optimum policies require a longer-term and less parochial perspective than normally prevails in political debate, the deployment of the best scientific advice, and engagement of a wider public.

In science itself, the most dramatic conceptual advances are the least predictable but, in scanning these intellectual horizons, we must be mindful that there may be fundamental limits to our understanding - concepts about key aspects of reality that human brains and accordingly, even computer-aided, cannot currently grasp.

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Download a transcript of the lecture - Romanes Lecture - The Limits of Science - Lord Rees (156 kb)

Information can be Psychologically Dangerous

NO ONE ever tells you how dangerous this stuff can be: they just go on pumping it out, hour after hour, day after day. You're consuming it right now, without a clue about the possible consequences. The worst thing is, evolution has predisposed your brain to crave it as much as your body craves fat and sugar. And these days - as with fat and sugar - you can get it everywhere.

That's because we live in the information age - and the stuff that risks doing the damage is information itself. As certain scientists and philosophers see it, the discovery and dissemination of knowledge is far from being an unqualified boon. We might be in danger of knowing too much. "Information can potentially be extremely dangerous," says philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. "The effects arising from knowledge can be momentous."

Humans are uniquely at risk because we have always craved information. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar and his colleagues at the University of Oxford suggest that this trait has almost certainly been bred into us during our evolutionary history. Evidence for this idea comes from the observation that in birds and primates, brain size is correlated with the ability to reason, to develop new feeding strategies and to survive extinction. "Clearly, the capacity to discover novel facts about the environment has a very ancient basis," Dunbar says.

For humans, new information has in the past brought a clear evolutionary advantage. The invention of spiked clubs, triremes, longbows, gunpowder and all the other military technologies can be traced to the discovery of new information. Each one enabled its inventors to steal a march on the competition. The information embodied in the laws of thermodynamics led to the development of efficient steam engines and, in short order, all the prosperity and exploitation of the British empire.

Full article can be found here .....

Ötzi the iceman: Leaves a Wealth of Knowledge

Ötzi is a mummified human discovered in 1991 in the Schnalstal glacier in the Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy. He died around 3300 BC.

The mummy offers a wealth of information about the humans living in Europe at the time. Ötzi was named after the Ötztal region where he was found.

The new EURAC Iceman photoscan website now gives all web users access to images of the body gathered by researchers. The site has a dynamic online-map-style interface to let people zoom into photographs that capture Ötzi from all angles and show details as small as 1 millimetre.

(Image: © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology / Eurac / Marco Samadelli / Gregor Staschitz)