I understand there are many aspects of nature that are ever changing. That said, is it possible that in 10,000-100,000 years from now we will have essentially solved all the static, unchanging mysteries of science, or reached the absolute limits of what can possibly be tested?
there isn’t a list of problems to solve. there are always more things to know.
Would you say this will always be true in a fundamental science like physics?
More of a philosophical question than one that can be answered factually. Yes, it’s possible that we’ll eventually exhaust all avenues toward further meaningful discoveries. But it’s also possible that we won’t.
How could one even debate the issue? Any argument “for” depends on underlying assumptions about reality…as does any argument “against.”
We might get quantum computing, zero point energy, artificial intelligence, cosmic string manipulation, even time travel! Global causality violation! The “singularity” of all singularities.
Or…we might bump into barriers, such as the speed of light appears, now, to be, and simply can’t make any further progress. No possible way to know, until we get there and see for ourselves!
“Science” is the current maximun level that human intelligence can understand the underlying structure of the Universe. There is a difference between the Laws of Science which are human constructs and the ‘Laws of Nature’ (what is in fact the case.) Essentially, Laws of Science are best case models of the Laws of Nature. Limits on human intelligence will always cut in before everything is known about these ‘Laws of Nature’.
I think that the Truth in science is a continuous carpet extending off into things that get harder and harder to understand. I think the carpet of understanding extends off to infinity, or at least beyond our reach. I can’t imagine any reason at all why the underlying nature of the universe has some kind of limit built into it to keep it within the range of our comprehension.
I love my cats, but I don’t think they will ever get integral calculus, and that isn’t even that hard. I am sure they would be more interested in a ping pong ball that rolled around on the floor in the breeze, than in a ping pong ball that levitated quietly. Surely there could be some alien animal so much more clever than we that they’d say the same kind of thing about us. And another wonderful animal beyond their ken, and so forth, way beyond our grasp.
I think it was in something by Isaac Asimov that I encountered the aim that science is fractal: the further you go into a branch of it, the more details there are to investigate.
the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
Since this requires speculation, let’s move it over to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Every answer will always come with more questions. As you go deeper and deeper, those questions can become more and more esoteric, but they’re always there.
If I understand the OP correctly, he/she is very open to the possibility that there will always be “more questions” but that perhaps we will know beyond a doubt that those questions simply cannot be answered because they are not scientifically testable. If we ever get to that case, where the scientific community in a given field is saying “sure there are some things we don’t know and can’t answer, here are our best guesses but the questions in and of themselves simply are not scientifically testable and all the evidence that could help us answer it is long gone” then that would match what the OP is asking as far as a field of science being complete.
In Physics, you have theoretical limits on the “graininess” of the universe due to the Planck length, time, etc. If our understanding of the universe ever gets down to that scale, we simply will not be able to get any better of an understanding because of the fundamental resolution available to us, and probably not even get close to that level either.
In Geology, we might be able to get a very very clear picture of the Earth at any stage of its life, especially as we explore exoplanets (if we ever do), but so much of the evidence is gone that the best we can do in many cases is make best guesses and models that are far from 100% accuracy.
I’ve thought about this before. It was my understanding that as far as physics, we had figured most things out already. Granted we don’t have a theory of everything, and I’m sure there is a lot of stuff I don’t understand yet that are still being worked out but things like newtonian physics are pretty much solved.
The rules that govern the universe are finite. Sooner or later we will figure them out.
However the rules of chemistry and physics can be used to tranform matter and energy into virtually infinite forms. So I don’t think we will ever get bored (considering that boredom is just an emotion that exists in our finite brains, the idea that we would ever get bored is absurd).
Provided you’re willing to overlook inconvenient subjects such as dark matter and dark energy - which according to current theories make up something like 94% of the total mass-energy of the universe.
If “solved” includes such meanings as “known to accurately describe only a small - albeit a very useful - part of the total picture”.
What case is there to believe otherwise? Please show one field of science where “everything” has been figured out. What the heck is “everything” anyway?