Science is a formal description of the world in terms of generality, predictiveness and interest, fine. It's a constraint. But I do not, as you know, believe it's exhaustive and, yes, there are limits of science; it's obvious where they are. For... for example, the known universe at the speed of light, we know, what is what now 13 billion years or something like that, but we can't get beyond and there's no way within our known physics that we could ever get beyond that particular light barrier. And when we come to the Big Bang there... there are going to be people who are saying, 'Well, yes, what it is is a fluctuation in a false vacuum and that's how it all happened.' But the idea that somehow we would be able to get beyond that without asking silly questions like, 'What was time like before the Big Bang?' And the answer according to what we presently know is: 'Don't be silly, there is none.'

There's also clearly the notion that science does not replace the world or duplicate it in giving it its formal properties, and that's a pretty important thing too. And then if you put that together with our idea about how creativity rests in a certain sense on metaphor and ambiguity, both of which are lousy as scientific theories but as a beginning, and then get refined according to procedures, depending on the history of that science, etc., and its modes. When you put all that together I think you get a lenient, more modest view of what we can do. Now, I know what the answer could be from a skeptic. It would be: 'Well, you can't tell what the future will bring.' And that skeptic would be perfectly right; it could be that everything I say right now is nonsense. It could very well be that 200 years from now science will uncover things that we just absolutely couldn't even have thought of.