The limits of science & the science of limits

The Art of the Impossible

I am not young enough to know everything

J.M.BARRIE

When we are young we think we know everything. But if we grow wiser as we grow older, we will gradually discover that we know less than we thought, and that the world is full of imprevisibility and even.... impossible things. Uncover some of the limits of science and see how our mind take awareness of the impossible gives us new perspectives of the reality.

We expect science to tell us everything, but what about dealing with the impossible. Can science help us?

The notion of the impossible has a history bound up with our religious desires, the worship of beings or spirits and the idea of miracles. All of these, defies the rules of nature. But how can a Being exist for whom nothing is impossible? For whom 2+2=5; who is not bound by the laws of logic? Surely some things must be impossible or chaos and contradiction will arise.

Impossibility seems to be a necessary prerequisite for a scientific understanding of the world.

The word 'paradox' is a synthesis two Greek words, "para", beyond, and "doxos", belief. While some paradoxes maybe trivial, others reflect profound problems about our ways of thinking and challenge us to re-evaluate them or to seek out unsuspected inconsistencies in the beliefs that we held to be self-evidently true.

The representation of the impossible has become a prominent part of the modern artistic world.

Impossible objects are know by their ability to deceive the viewer into believing that he has entered a possible world which, on closer scrutiny, turns out to be inconsistent with the nature of space in which we live. More specificaly, impossible objects are two-dimensional images of apparent three-dimensional objects which cannot exist as we have interpreted them: that is, they cannot be constructed in three-dimensional space.

Notable examples

The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

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