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Identify and Scientific Ignorance

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Lewis Thomas points out the ignorance in science and proposes his interesting methods to treat it in his masterful, but quite arguable essay "Humanities and Science." The author claims that some scientists tend to convince themselves that they know everything; he explains it referring to Lord Kelvin, who was a scientist of the past, as an example that ignorance actually exists in science. In the first half of his essay, Lewis Thomas draws a conclusion that people may think that everything in the natural world is known and is already explained. In the second half, the author elaborates on possible methods of how humanities can make science better and more enjoyable to sophisticated students. In "Humanities and Science," Lewis Thomas encourages to deal with the ignorance in science by stating that humanities are free from the ignorance and applying humanistic approach to science as a way to deal with the ignorance. However, through setting limits on science, tracing the ignorance, and suggesting the possible methods to eliminate the ignorance (while questioning that can it actually be erased) from science with the respect to modern society, I hope to persuade the reader and disprove some of the points that the author makes in his essay. Prior to discussing how the ignorance really applies to science, I would like to point out that ignorance in science is not about having ignorant people in scientific community, it is the specific idea that of overestimating your knowledge or scientific capabilities in general. There are limits of science, defined in the physics handout, a summarization of "Understanding Science" website. These limits include: scientific solutions are only attempts to explain nature, science cal only solve certain types of problems, science operates with limited types of known explanations. Having the limitations of science can only suggest that people who are familiar with these limits cannot develop the ignorance, which greatly reduces the possibility that ignorance in science takes place in our world. Also, the author of the book Beyond Relativism: Science and Human Values, Roger Masters, briefly mentions that his book is directed to the study of the limitations of science (6). This work is going to be used later in my essay, which makes it extremely relevant to the topic, creating a link between the limits of science and the problems concerning the scientific ignorance. Taking into account that both sources are relatively modern, and the limits are contemporarily defined, one might argue that such unawareness of that there is a lot of unknown information about the universe was only prevalent in the past centuries. The author of the essay claims that facts in science are irrefutable, and he describes science in such a way that it seems science is static. Again, according to the limitations of science "scientific solutions are only attempts to explain nature; they are not facts." Lewis Thomas ment

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