Supervisor: K. Brad Wray    

Humans have always sought to explain the workings of the world and we have made up stories in effort to make sense of it. This has been done through myth and religion, but in the last couple of centuries we have mostly relied on the stories told by science. The stories of myth and religion do not necessarily tell us anything true about the world, but is this different for science? The impeccable success of predictions and manipulations in all areas of science seems to indicate so. However, though the history of science many successful and celebrated theories has later been widely revised or even rejected. So, do we have any reason to believe that scientific theories yield true knowledge of the world or are they merely useful stories? This colloquium will investigate the arguments for and against science’s ability to deliver knowledge about the universe and will argue that we have good reason to believe that the structures we find in scientific theories corresponds to something real.