Divisão de Observação da Terra e Geoinformática

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physics tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.

Weisskopf: “Looking at the development of science in the Twentieth Century one can distinguish two trends, which I will call “intensive” and “extensive” research, lacking a better terminology. In short: intensive research goes for the fundamental laws, extensive research goes for the explanation of phenomena in terms of known fundamental laws. […] There is always much less intensive research going on than extensive. Once new fundamental laws are discovered, a large and ever increasing activity begins in order to apply the discoveries to hitherto (up to this time) unexplained phenomena.”

Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.