For a variety of reasons, historical and geographical, northern New Mexico has become a node in a network of people the world over who are beginning to question some of science's most deeply entrenched faiths. I found that rather than hop a plane to the West Coast, the East Coast, or another continent, I could sit like a spider in the middle of this web and wait as Santa Fe attracted some of the most interesting thinkers in the world. While some offer arresting new ways to think about physics and biology, others are turning their sights inward and contemplating the built-in limits of their enterprise. A theory can be thought of as the fitting of a curve to a spray of data. One can always simply go from point to point, connecting the dots like those in a child's coloring book.
Science is the search for neat, predictable curves, compact ways of summarizing the data.
But there is always the danger that the curves we see are illusory, like pictures of animals in the clouds. There are two opposing ways to view the scientific enterprise. Almost all science books, popular and unpopular, are written with the assumption that there actually are laws of the universe out there, like veins of gold, and that scientists are miners extracting the ore. In our society, we make a distinction between the history of science and the history of everything else. In the history of a country or an individual, there is no necessary pattern things have to follow.