Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'
Interpretation
Science can explain the mechanisms behind phenomena, but it struggles to address the underlying reasons or purposes.
In this quote, Erwin Chargaff highlights the distinction between the capabilities of science and the philosophical inquiries about existence and purpose. While science excels in providing empirical answers to questions of 'how' things happen—such as the processes and mechanisms inherent in nature—it often falls short when confronted with the deeper inquiries of 'why' things occur, which pertain to meaning and interpretation beyond mere observation. This reflects the limitations of scientific inquiry, suggesting that not all questions can be answered through empirical evidence alone.
In practice
In a philosophy lecture discussing the limits of scientific inquiry.
Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.
One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.
You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.
Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own.
We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics.
If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.
It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.
If Providence has created the stars and the planets, man has called the cannonball into existence.
Any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan.
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