Why it is important to explore the outer limits of knowledge

Science and reason generate reliable knowledge about the world, but they have their limits. Exploring them can shed light on what knowledge really is, and should help us gain more of it

SCIENCE is the culmination of humanity’s attempts to reason about the world. It produces knowledge in a reliable way, and it has done so with great success. It has revealed many of nature’s secrets, from the molecular machinery inside cells to the grand scheme of how the universe began and evolved to what we see today. But for all their undoubted achievements, science and reason have their constraints.

Our species is unique (as far as we know) in its ability to know what we don’t know. That alone might make us duty bound to explore the limits of knowledge and …