• Question: What is the point of trying to understand the universe when it only leads to more questions?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      I don’t think it ‘only’ leads to more questions…

      It also leads to greater understanding, more knowledge, and as a consequence, technological revolutions, improvement in our quality of life, cures to diseases, and in the end, most certainly the survival of our species…

      But even beyond this, science is somehow the expression of a universal human feeling: it’s a manifestation of our curiosity and desire to figure out answers to the most profound questions. I don’t think it matters if we will eventually succeed or not (I certainly won’t be there to figure it out!), those attempts are us being human.

    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      For a scientists, questions are good! If you run out of questions then it probably means that you have understood everything. The more questions that we can answer, the closer and closer we can get to the truth about what makes the Universe work.

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      I think Laurence has nailed this! It doesn’t matter that we might never understand everything, understanding a little bit more or just a little bit better doesn’t just open new questions it also open new doors for technologies which could really change our life!

      Besides that, I still believe that from a philosophical standpoint, trying to understand everything just a little bit better is a very worthy quest!

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      we also get a lot of answers from it too! 😛 But our curiosity as a species means that we always want to know more.

      We’re fairly new to this “existing” thing (if the age of the universe is a calender, with the big bang at 00:00 January the 1st, then all of human history is in the last few seconds of 23:59 on the 31st of December). We are like young children trying to find out where we fit in the world. Except young children only ask “why?”. Science is the “who what why when were how”

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