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The universe is complex enough to arouse awareness of restrictions imposed on what they can be aware of things from the inside… not well known, but this is not done, and can not be considered to determine our universe more clearly, more comprehensive and more intense than those who can.           Beyond the Known     The idea of the impossible rings alarm bells in the minds of many. To some, any suggestion that there might be limits to the scope of human understanding of the Universe or to scientific progress is a dangerous meme that undermines confidence in the scientific enterprise. Equally uncritical, are those who enthusiastically embrace any suggestion that science might be limited because they suspect the motives and fear the dangers of unbridled investigation of the unknown.   At the end of each century there seems to arise a stock-taking in science… At the end of the last century the issue of the limits of science became a live one and attempts were made to pick out problems that could never be solved. These problems still make interesting reading. But what will people say about our concerns in a hundred years time? As we near the end of the twentieth century we look back on an extraordinary century of progress. Yet it is progress that possesses some extraordinary characteristics. A pattern has emerged in many spheres of inquiry in which a scientific theory becomes so successful in the quantity and quality of its accurate predictions that its practitioners start to wonder whether the end is in sight—whether their theory might be able to explain everything within its encompass. But then something strange happens. The theory predicts that it cannot predict. It turns out to be not simply limited in scope, but self-limiting. This pattern is so strikingly recurrent that it suggests to us that we can recognize mature scientific theories by their self-limiting character. Such limits arise not merely because theories are inadequate, inaccurate, or inappropriate: they tell us something profound about the nature of knowledge and the implications of investigating the Universe from within.   ...Universes that are complex enough to give rise to consciousness impose limits on what can be known about them from within… The things that cannot be known, that cannot be done, and cannot be seen, define our Universe more clearly, more completely, and more sharply than those that can.         —John D Barrow, Impossibility - The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits             Indexes/06