Reply #3: Full transcript of Martin Rees's acceptance speech

[struggle4progress]

"Big questions" are central to the Templeton Foundation's agenda. None are bigger than those posed by cosmology: How large is physical reality? What is the role of life in the cosmos? How did our complex cosmos emerge, giving rise to conscious beings able to ponder the wonder and mystery of their existence? I'm privileged to have spent much of my life engaging with these issues, mainly based in Cambridge where I've benefited from collaboration and discussion with many mentors, colleagues and students. Moreover, this has been a time when (owing to technical advances) our knowledge and understanding has enlarged at an unprecedented rate ...

The bedrock nature of space and time, and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great "open frontiers". These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth – where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe "here be dragons".

But to call this a quest for the "theory of everything" is hubristic and misleading. Biologists and environmental scientists (and even most physical scientists) aren't held up at all by the lack of such a theory – they are tackling a third frontier: the very complex. Our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum and that's where 99% of scientists deploy their efforts. It may seem incongruous that scientists can make confident statements about galaxies billions of light years away, while being baffled about issues close at hand that we all care about – diet and common diseases, for instance. But this is because living things with intricate levels of structure (even the smallest insects) are far more complex than atoms and stars.

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests – is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn't offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws. Reductionism is true in a sense. But it's seldom true in a useful sense. Problems in biology, and in environmental and human sciences, remain unsolved because it's hard to elucidate their complexities – not because we don't understand subatomic physics well enough ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/06/templeton-prize-2011-martin-rees-speech