I know it seems silly to ask if science ends, as oftentimes, when you solve one mystery or answer one question; several more questions/problems pop up to take its place, like hydra heads. There is also no way to know everything as the human mind cannot understand infinity (you’d have to be a god and it’s unknown if we can achieve that level of advancement)

Yet, while we constantly make incremental discoveries every year; it seems the days of discoveries as significant as electricity, gravity, atoms, DNA etc are well behind us and we are not really uncovering any new fundamental laws in nature. We don’t know for sure but it seems unlikely that we will ever discover, say, a new color or a sixth Platonic solid and certain highly desirable future technologies like Faster-than-light travel or anti-gravity will never materialize no matter how hard we try to make them a reality

Science appears to be moving more rapidly than ever but that’s just from our narrow perspective. Science has always moved slowly and most times; individuals live and die before entirely new ways of thinking come into our species’s awareness

Yet in some distant future; will science as we know it come to halt as there will really be no significant new things to discover OR is it a never-ending conversation- a zero-sum game?

3 hours ago, Maximum7 said:

I know it seems silly to ask if science ends, as oftentimes, when you solve one mystery or answer one question; several more questions/problems pop up to take its place, like hydra heads. There is also no way to know everything as the human mind cannot understand infinity (you’d have to be a god and it’s unknown if we can achieve that level of advancement)

Yet, while we constantly make incremental discoveries every year; it seems the days of discoveries as significant as electricity, gravity, atoms, DNA etc are well behind us and we are not really uncovering any new fundamental laws in nature. We don’t know for sure but it seems unlikely that we will ever discover, say, a new color or a sixth Platonic solid and certain highly desirable future technologies like Faster-than-light travel or anti-gravity will never materialize no matter how hard we try to make them a reality

Science appears to be moving more rapidly than ever but that’s just from our narrow perspective. Science has always moved slowly and most times; individuals live and die before entirely new ways of thinking come into our species’s awareness

Yet in some distant future; will science as we know it come to halt as there will really be no significant new things to discover OR is it a never-ending conversation- a zero-sum game?

Well if one takes the view, as I do, that science makes ever more accurate models of the physical world, one should expect an asymptotic approach to reality and thus fewer and fewer ground-breaking changes over time. There are some big unsolved issues though. Things in cosmology like dark matter and dark energy (I’m intrigued by entropic gravity which would be a radical change in how that is modelled) and in biochemistry around the origin of life. We will get some breakthroughs there, I’m sure. In particle physics I find it a bit suspicious that the fundamental unit of electric charge in leptons is 1 whereas for hadrons it is 1/3. Something fishy there, perhaps? And in the applied sciences, like medicine, there is clearly huge scope for progress.

10 hours ago, Maximum7 said:

Yet in some distant future; will science as we know it come to halt as there will really be no significant new things to discover OR is it a never-ending conversation- a zero-sum game?

There is an urban legend that back in 1899 Charles Holland Duell who was the Commissioner of the US patent office suggested that his position should be closed down because “everything that can be invented has already been invented”. The story is quite untrue, and was based in part on a joke printed in Punch magazine that same year which in turn played on a comment made in 1843 by an earlier commissioner Henry Ellsworth who said  that “progress was so fast it taxed belief.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell

The timing of 1899 and the locale of a patent office is however quite interesting. In June 1902 an obscure German physicist called Albert Einstein was employed in the Swiss Federal patent office in Bern as a technical expert class III. He whiled away his time by writing private research papers, including one on special relativity in 1905, and another on the photo-electric effect the same year  (which won him the Nobel prize in 1921) before being promoted to the rank of a second class expert in 1906 -  in which capacity he worked for another three years, before leaving to pursue full-time academic work on general relativity in 1909.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers

Given that another German physicist Max Planck also first presented a paper on quantum theory in 1900, history suggests that any attempt to write an endpoint into scientific discovery is likely to be premature.

1 hour ago, toucana said:

There is an urban legend that back in 1899 Charles Holland Duell who was the Commissioner of the US patent office suggested that his position should be closed down because “everything that can be invented has already been invented”. The story is quite untrue, and was based in part on a joke printed in Punch magazine that same year which in turn played on a comment made in 1843 by an earlier commissioner Henry Ellsworth who said  that “progress was so fast it taxed belief.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell

The timing of 1899 and the locale of a patent office is however quite interesting. In June 1902 an obscure German physicist called Albert Einstein was employed in the Swiss Federal patent office in Bern as a technical expert class III. He whiled away his time by writing private research papers, including one on special relativity in 1905, and another on the photo-electric effect the same year  (which won him the Nobel prize in 1921) before being promoted to the rank of a second class expert in 1906 -  in which capacity he worked for another three years, before leaving to pursue full-time academic work on general relativity in 1909.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers

Given that another German physicist Max Planck also first presented a paper on quantum theory in 1900, history suggests that any attempt to write an endpoint into scientific discovery is likely to be premature.

I don't anyone is suggesting an "end point" though. The suggestion is just that revolutionary breakthroughs of the magnitude of relativity and quantum theory seem less likely now.

I would like to emphasize a point exchemist made, science is fundamentally a process and methodology and as such it does not have an inherent end point. Even if the natural world could be somehow be fully understood (an extremely unlikely assumption) science methodologies can continued to be deployed to interact with the world based on that knowledge.

20 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Even if the natural world could be somehow be fully understood (an extremely unlikely assumption)

Do you think we can even hazard a guess as to whether such an achievement is likely or unlikely?

It might transpire that discoveries are made that are so fundamental that it might seem that everything that we have observed could be explained on that basis into the finest generality (if that is not an oxymoron) whereas we might arrive at similarly fundamental discoveries that lead to an assessment that no such applicability pertains.

I think we have no way of knowing whether the workings of Nature are simple or completely unpredicable and complicated at heart.

I don't even know which outcome is the more to be wished for.(the journey is said to be as interesting as the destination)

Edited yesterday at 05:09 PM1 day by geordief

3 minutes ago, geordief said:

Do you think we can even hazard a guess as to whether such an achievement is likely or unlikely?

It might transpire that discoveries are made that are so fundamental that it might seem that everything that we have observed could be explained on that basis into the finest generality (if that is not an oxymoron) whereas we might arrive at similarly fundamental discoveries that lead to an assessment that no such applicability pertains.

I think we have no way of knowing whether the workings of Nature are simple or completely unpredicable and complicated at heart.

I don't even know which outcome is the more to be wished for.(the journey is said to be as interesting as the destination)

I'm puzzled by your comment that nature might be unpredictable at heart. Surely we already know from the success of science up to this point that nature is predictable? Not 100% deterministic, sure (Heisenberg etc.) but still predictable to within certain well defined predictable limits.

Perhaps the discoveries are being made in other branches of Science ?

Some branches are definitely more mature than others, but progress is still being made, with no end in sight.

Many of these newer branches have become possible as the accumulated knowledge and wisdom increases, along with material wealth and comfort.

Should these latter fall apart as with the end of the Roman Empire perhaps we would regress and have to rediscover things ?

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

I'm puzzled by your comment that nature might be unpredictable at heart. Surely we already know from the success of science up to this point that nature is predictable? Not 100% deterministic, sure (Heisenberg etc.) but still predictable to within certain well defined predictable limits.

Well,maybe I was just spouting but we don't know what we might learn in the future .

Of course any "unpredictability at the heart" would have to also encompass the statistical predictability (if that is the correct term) you refer to and which is apparently well observed.

I am one who thinks it isn't endless, that, at least for fundamental physics, it can approach an endpoint. The endpoint may not be the same as knowing it all. It is just an opinionated bloke's opinion of course. There may be some unknowables (does it count as knowable if it takes AI to know but no humans can understand what the AI says?) but I do think we will get more of the fundamental physics correct over time and shrink the 'unknowns' down and may well end up able to distinguish the knowable from the unknowable. And I suspect less answers are needed than the proliferation of unanswered questions might suggest - that getting the fundamentals right for some crucial ones will give solutions for others.

Outside fundamental physics, where complexity is rife - life sciences especially - there may forever be more to describe and understand. With most of the universe beyond our physical reach to observe there will be unknowables.