By progress, he meant the ability to fit more and more transistors on to a tiny area of silicon circuit board and also the cost of so doing. Gordon Moore was the co-founder of the Intel chip production company, and in 1965 he wrote an article in Electricity magazine, a popular electronics magazine, where he made a prediction about the rate of progress in the micro-electronics industry. Some of you will have heard of Moore’s Law. The idea of learning more and more about the world is bound up with the idea of progress. Some of those limits are rather unusual, and there are some general lessons about the nature of reality, I believe, to be learned from those limits. There are different types of limit on what can be done and what can be known via the scientific process and in an exploration of nature. I am going to talk about what we can do, and what we cannot do. I am not going to talk about what we should do. The whole idea of limits is a very big topic. One way of viewing those is as constraints on what is possible in nature, and in this talk, I am going to talk about particular types of limits of science. There appear to be so-called laws of nature. There are conservation principles in nature. There are constraints on what can happen in nature. We have also learnt that the nature of science is possible, has its form that we know, only because there are limits to what is possible. It focuses its attention upon soluble problems, it asks questions which it is believed can be both answered and also the answers can be tested. Modern science is not really quite so ambitious. Everything has a meaning, and nothing is left unexplained. If you look at mythological accounts of the nature of the universe, then there is an answer for every question.
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