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Much of the progress of science consists in a recognition of what we do not know, what we cannot know, and the nature of our ignorance.
Major developments in science reflect the recognition of various kinds of ignorance. The development of empiricism implies that there are aspects of reality unknowable through sheer cogitation (e.g., Hume, 1739). Error and imprecision in empirical investigation were seen first as correctable human failings but later understood to be aspects of the empirical method itself (Fisher, 1951). Nevertheless, the term “experimental error” is used to this day for that branch of statistics which studies these phenomena, as a tribute to the hope that these “errors” may be “corrected” (e.g., Topping, 1955). Inherently statistical phenomena (e.g., genetics and entropy) suggest the idea of the inevitable limits of our knowledge; however, the situation seems to be saved by positing that a deeper knowledge of the same phenomenon would restore our potential to predict and understand fully (Bohm, 1957). The idea of what it is possible to know shifts with the development of the special theory of relativity (Einstein, 1931) and the related emergence of positivistic philosophy. Now the idea of an absolute reality whose nature we seek to discover disappears. It is replaced with a reality whose nature lies in the process of observation. However, our “ignorance” or rather recognition of the absence of an absolute reality still permits prediction and a world view in which nature can be known precisely. The new quantum mechanics, as exemplified by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, takes away even this comfort and demonstrates that real experiments, by their very nature, may have unpredictable outcomes (Heisenberg, 1930). Ignorance of the physical world is an inevitable result