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  • RET Third Sunday Meeting

RET Third Sunday Meeting

  • 10/16/2016
  • 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
  • Goins Building Cafeteria Annex, Pellissippi State Community College

The RET third Sunday meeting in October will feature a DVD presentation from the Skeptics Society Distinguished Lecture Series by Professor Marcelo Gleiser titled “The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science & the Search for Meaning”.

Do all questions have answers? How much can we know about the world? Is there such a thing as an ultimate truth? To be human is to want to know, but what we are able to observe is only a tiny portion of what’s “out there.” In “The Island of Knowledge”, Dartmouth College astronomer and physicist Dr. Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, the main tool we use to find answers, is fundamentally limited. These limits to our knowledge arise both from our tools of exploration and from the nature of physical reality: the speed of light, the uncertainty principle, the impossibility of seeing beyond the cosmic horizon, the incompleteness theorem, and our own limitations as an intelligent species. Recognizing limits in this way, Gleiser argues, is not a deterrent to progress or a surrendering to religion. Rather, it frees us to question the meaning and nature of the universe while affirming the central role of life and ourselves in it. Science can and must go on, but recognizing its limits reveals its true mission: to know the universe is to know ourselves.

 

 

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