I was teaching a physics lab section at a major university. A wide-eyed undergraduate in my class realized that I was a graduate student in physics, and she asked me in a fully earnest way, "What is there left to know? Hasn't everything already been discovered?" I think the premise of the post is ridiculous on its face. Yes, there are lots of people doing research now; more than ever before, and in some ways the boundaries of the known world keep expanding. But any good scientist will tell you form personal experience that the more we learn, the more we see hoe little we know. You can understand some basic systems very well, and there are some you can master. You can even scratch the surface of complexity, but there's an infinite variety to the world, there are new phenomena being discovered every day. The one thing you cannot know is what the future holds.

So does George Allen