I've been invited to speak to you on the question can science explain everything.

And the material for this talk was researched partly for a recent book with the same title,

but also partly for a lecture I gave in British Academy in London on what I call scientific fundamentalism,

and we shall come to that a little bit later.

But the topic has always interested me.

Can science explain everything?

But of course being a pure mathematician, I need to start with definitions

at least some. What do we mean by science? Well, etymologically, it comes from the

Latin word scientia, or the verb skier to know, to know, skill, I know.

And originally the word science came into the English language

through William Hewell in the 1880s.

But it earlier meant scientific knowledge of all kinds.

And we need to bear that in mind because nowadays, in the daily speaking world, science means,

exclusively almost, the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, biology and so on,

as contrasted with the humanities, literature, languages, history, philosophy and theology.

But the older meaning is still around, sometimes explicitly, and at other times

co-vercly. For example, in German, the word Wysenshaft is coming from the word Wissen to know, advice I know,

means science in the scienthia in the old sense.

And the Germans divided contemporarily into two Naturysenchaft, that's the natural sciences, there's chemistry, and then the geistice

Wysenchafter, and they are the humanities.

And the people are difficult, as in the translation of my recent book do you use listen shaft because the title

actually is about natua listen shaft now what we're going to be talking about tonight is the view

...