Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…1 of the answers that might seem obvious to people is that we pursue science because we are curious. We just want to know how the world works. We want to reveal, discover the underlying principles of the universe which apply in all cases. Switching off the idea that you are just interested in nature for its own sake out of curiosity and saying okay how can we engineer these systems to actually do things that we want. Getting them to behave in artificial ways. If those simplifications sort of allow you to achieve your technological goals. There is no in principle problem with oversimplification if you are going to say I am not just interested in nature for its own sake, I just want applied science. I should say by the way that the Brain Abstractors probably influenced my thinking more in 2025 than anything else. She's an inspirational lady. I look up to her very much and certainly thinking back on many of the episodes we've done in 2025, I can see her influence in the questions I ask and how I think about things. So here's her starting point. Scientists have to simplify. We're limited creatures trying to wrap our heads around systems way more complex than we can actually comprehend. Our working memory holds maybe 7 items. Our attention is more scattered than a group of toddlers with iPads. We die after 80 years if we're lucky. So we build models. Right? We leave stuff out on purpose. We tell ourselves stories about how the world works. But the question is, why does any of this even work at all? Science is a humanistic endeavor. Right? The purpose of science in the universe is to make the universe intelligible to us, not to control it, not to predict it, and not to exploit it. Now, you can do all those wonderful things if you like, but in the end, as far as I'm concerned, science is no different from poetry. It's that we're trying to make sense of the world, trying to give it meaning in relation to our own existence.…

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