“One truth we have been able to count on concerning scientific persuit over the centuries has been that only testable theories survive the intense scrutiny of experimental science.”

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 8, Strings And Quantum Gravity, p. 136

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John Moffat22

British-Canadian physicist 1932

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Context: It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.