Can science explain everything? Can science explain anything?
Steven Weinberg · 2004
Abstract One evening a few years ago I was with some other faculty members at the University of Texas, telling a group of undergraduates about work in our respective disciplines. I outlined the great progress we physicists had made in explaining what was known experimentally about elementary particles and fields – how when I was a student I had to learn a large variety of miscellaneous facts about particles, forces, and symmetries; how in the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s all these odds and ends were explained in what is now called the Standard Model of elementary particles; how we learned that these miscellaneous facts about particles could be deduced mathematically from a few fairly simple principles; and how a great collective Aha! then went out from the community of physicists. After my remarks, a faculty colleague (not a particle physicist) commented ‘Well, of course, you know science does not really explain things – it just describes them.’