• Question: How long do you think that science can carry on for until we discover everything?

    Asked by ruddockawh to David, Helen, Ian, rhysphillips, Sarah on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Rhys Phillips

      Rhys Phillips answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      We’ll never discover everything – the world is a constantly changing place and so there’ll always be surprises along the way.

    • Photo: Sarah Cook

      Sarah Cook answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      Science will go on forever and ever – we are really only starting to be aware of everything we don’t yet know!

    • Photo: Ian van der Linde

      Ian van der Linde answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      The human race will be extinct before we discover everything.

    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      To some extent science is like a bucket with a hole in it – as we fill it with knowledge, some keeps leaking out, and eventually we fill the bucket to the top and everything new pours out over the rim. We forget things, people who know things die, and the bucket is also full of sludge (old theories that won’t go away, results and findings that are wrong because the experiment was flawed, and nobody knows that). The ‘bucket’ represents our ability to understand and exploit with what we already know — which is really very poor. Thanks to humans being so dim, science will have to go on forever.

    • Photo: Helen Fletcher

      Helen Fletcher answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Probably for ever! One of the things about science, is once you discover something, it nearly always raises *more* questions. So the more science you do, the more new science is needed to answer the newest questions. Some things are very hard to discover no matter how good a scientist you are (eg what actually goes on in a black hole or what actually causes gravity) or how much you spend on big expensive equipment, but we can often get a good idea, even about the really difficult stuff. Science is partly about testing these ideas and changing them if something new is discovered that affects these ideas.

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