Abstract
The present discussion is not put forward with the usual pride of the scientist who feels that he can make an addition, however small, to a problem which has aroused his and his colleagues’ interest. Rather, it is a speculation of a kind which all of us feel a great reluctance to undertake: much like the speculation on the ultimate fate of somebody who is very dear to us. It is a speculation on the future of science itself, whether it will share, at some very distant future, the fate of “Alles was entsteht ist Wert dass es zu Grunde geht”*. Naturally, in such a speculation one wishes to assume the best of conditions for one’s subject and disregard the danger of an accident that may befall it, however real that danger may be.
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This may be freely translated as ‘Everything that emerges, (comes to existence, evolves) deserves (merits?) to decay (perish)”. It is rather a poetical version of “what goes up must come down’.
Reproduced with kind permission of Springer Science+Business Media: The Limits of Science from Eugene Paul Wigner’s Philosophical Reflections and Syntheses annotated by Gerard G Emch, Edited by Jagdish Mehra and Arthur S Wightman, pp.523–533, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 1995. Original copyright: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol.94, No.5 (October, 1950).
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Wigner, E.P. The limits of science. Reson 14, 1018–1027 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-009-0089-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-009-0089-2