Monday, June 22, 2009

Art and Science

My daughter asked me, on returning from the doctor's: "The art of medicine; or the science?" I answered, somewhat cynically, but true to myself: "All knowledge, and it's application (based on cause/effect experimental replication and predictability), is an art; never absolute science. At some lower levels (some percentage) of predictability, we call it and art; at higher levels we call it a science. But: what that cut-off level (percentage) is, is arbitrary. 99.9%? 43%? 87%? Remember, even the absolute 100%'surety' of the pre-20th Century Newtonian universe was thrown in disarray by Einstein's theory of relativity.

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