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.
I just felt that space was the next thing coming in aviation. It was higher, faster. It had the risk.
It's important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don't know.
For me, it was my first cosmic connection, on par with a first kiss. No other planet looks as unworldly or surreal as Saturn. When you see it floating in the eyepiece of your telescope, you feel as if you've uncovered mystery in the cosmos.
In less than eight years "The Origin of Species" has produced conviction in the minds of a majority of the most eminent living men of science. New facts, new problems, new difficulties as they arise are accepted, solved, or removed by this theory; and its principles are illustrated by the progress and conclusions of every well established branch of human knowledge.
Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.
We have at most ten years - not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions... We are near a tipping point, a point of no return, beyond which the built in momentum and feedbacks will carry us to levels of climate change with staggering consequences for humanity and all of the residents of this planet.
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