Thinking about the methodology of science and the fact that the definition of science is the methodology, as opposed to a more regular way words are defined, something occurred to me as regards the limits of science.
One of the stages of this process is the hypothesis. This is an idea that attempts to explain the problem being studied. The hypothesis is a general statement of how one thinks the scientific phenomenon in question works. The prediction lets one get specific -- how will one demonstrate that the hypothesis is true? The experiment that is then designed is done to test the prediction and experiment is of course the next stage of the scientific method after hypothesis.
There is more to the scientific method this, but part of what science is defined as entails a prediction, which hopefully is correct and helps a hypothesis get to the stage of being an excepted theory. A theory is never a proof but the highest stage of truth that science can reach, which is an important caveat in my view as regards the limits of science but that is not the point I want to make here.
The point I want to make is that prediction is part of the definition of science; otherwise it would not constitute what is called useful knowledge in the strict sense of the word useful. However there are many ideas that go by the label theory, that are accepted as science that deal not in prediction, but in the limits of prediction. Chaos theory is one of these as it states that some deterministic systems in nature does not make them predictable. Scientists generally accept now days that the Newtonian dream of a clockwork universe that could, in theory, be completely predictable if all the parts were known, is false. So in effect, science is telling us that according to its own definition of itself, it cannot answer all questions because it admits to inherent non predictability in the universe.
Another theory that also seems to breach the definition of science is quantum theory. The physicist Richard Feynman (1988) stated that quantum theory can be used to explain our entire physical world except gravity. It has been proved over and over to be a successful theory. However, when it comes to understanding what quantum theory says about our world, he acknowledged that “my physics students don’t understand it ... I don’t understand it. No-body does.”
This is interesting because part of the definition of science is the hypothesis, which again is a general statement of how the scientist THINKS the scientific phenomenon in question works. But scientists don’t understand quantum mechanics so how do they THINK it works? It works to predict small scale phenomena but breaks down at a certain point in scale. Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, thought up by physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, applied to everyday objects at large scale, resulting in a contradiction with common sense. So there are also theories that work in practice but no one knows how they work because they create contradictions with common sense. Is that really `understanding` given that understanding is supposed to be part of what defines science according to its own definition?
It seems to me that science is either limited in what it can tell us, or the definition of science is wrong, but considering that understanding is part of that definition it is hard to think that the problem is not with science itself in that it cannot provide answers for everything. There must be answers there, but it seems to be not that of science, if indeed this universe is not completely deterministic and predictable as scientists tell us.