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 August 7Aug 7 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.

On 8/7/2026 at 7:56 AM, exchemist said:

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.

I guess the endpoint will come when we no longer seek answers to questions or seek new questions to answer, so long as we remain curious, then science will keep going.

WRT the above I think eletrons are leptons so if they have a charge of -1 then for a proton to have a charge of +1 would the UUD quarks need a charge that adds up to +1 to maintain a neutral charge?

2 hours ago, paulsutton said:

I guess the endpoint will come when we no longer seek answers to questions or seek new questions to answer, so long as we remain curious, then science will keep going.

WRT the above I think eletrons are leptons so if they have a charge of -1 then for a proton to have a charge of +1 would the UUD quarks need a charge that adds up to +1 to maintain a neutral charge?

Sure but a proton is a composite particle, not an elementary one. If one consider compares the elementary particles, the quarks that comprise hadrons have a charge of either 1/3 or 2/3, whereas the leptons, like the electron or the muon have a charge of 1.

There seems to me to be a strange asymmetry about this, though of course it is not a rule that everything should be reducible to aesthetic simplicity.

On 8/7/2026 at 6:56 PM, Ken Fabian said:

I am one who thinks it isn't endless, that, at least for fundamental physics, it can approach an endpoint.

Not to be confrontational, but I am one who thinks it is endless.

We build models of reality to explain its workings and processes.
The models approach, but never quite reach, reality; if they did, we would build reality itself, and be God.
And I firmly believe there is no, nor can there be, God.

So enjoy the journey; there is no end.

35 minutes ago, MigL said:

Not to be confrontational, but I am one who thinks it is endless.

We build models of reality to explain its workings and processes.
The models approach, but never quite reach, reality; if they did, we would build reality itself, and be God.
And I firmly believe there is no, nor can there be, God.

So enjoy the journey; there is no end.

Agree.

Science has got pretty good at modelling simple, idealised, reversible processes.

It's barely scratched the surface of the hard stuff.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

Not to be confrontational, but I am one who thinks it is endless.

We build models of reality to explain its workings and processes.
The models approach, but never quite reach, reality; if they did, we would build reality itself, and be God.
And I firmly believe there is no, nor can there be, God.

So enjoy the journey; there is no end.

Indeed, as the late great Douglas Adams once intonated, when we finally understand this universe a great big sign will light up and say "Level two, begin"...

On 8/7/2026 at 6:08 PM, 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)

Fundamentally, it's your choice, "I think therefore I am" is a flawed philosophy, but can you think of a better one?

I do think the fundamental physics of our universe will turn out to be finite and is not going to be intrinsically unknowable and therefore can (potentially) be fully described correctly - which is not the same thing as human efforts being able to achieve that correct description, let alone be comprehensible by individual human beings. I am optimistic enough about science to believe that such an understanding can be achieved... if our societies support science well enough for long enough. Economics seem more of a limiting factor.

Perhaps AI will be needed to get there - and humans will spend a lot of effort trying to falsify/confirm it.

The potential for vast complexity arising out of all the interactions of matter and energy in their varied forms will persist even if each issue potentially can be understood with a sound understanding of the fundamental physics underpinning them. But again it could be economics and failure to adequately fund efforts to do so - much that will have no real applications to provide incentives - that prevents it.

Just my opinion, FWIW.

Edited Monday at 10:30 PM2 days by Ken Fabian

15 hours ago, dimreepr said:

"I think therefore I am" is a flawed philosophy, but can you think of a better one?

“There are thoughts, therefore there is thinking”

6 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

I do think the fundamental physics of our universe will turn out to be finite and is not going to be intrinsically unknowable and therefore can (potentially) be fully described correctly

The issue that is often forgotten here is computability - a system may be described by a known system of equations, and may indeed be fully deterministic, and yet it may be too computationally expensive to find solutions for all real-world circumstances. A good example are the Einstein equations of GR - they are only solvable in closed form for some highly idealised situations, and numerical methods for more realistic situations very quickly become extremely resource-heavy. And the full classification of all possible solutions is still an unsolved problem.

@Markus Hanke Yes, the economics (as I would say it) of the efforts needed may prevent solving problems that are potentially solvable. That is not the same as unknowable.

I do suspect that fundamental physics that is correct and complete - is possible and whilst complex will not be infinitely complex. That is - of course - no more than my amateur opinion. Other opinions differ.

What do those at the leading edge of theoretical physics think?

27 minutes ago, Ken Fabian said:

What do those at the leading edge of theoretical physics think?

We still only have two proper solutions for quantum mechanics.

One for an isolated hydrogen atom (Schroedinger / Dirac)

One for a single loose electron in electron bonding (Koenig Penny)

We have yet to have any full solutions in Fluid Mechanics to the Navier Stokes equations.

2008 saw the failure of our so called solution to the Black Scholes equation in economics.

We have no way of predicting the actual failure load of a simple piece of rope, we can only pull it apart and measure it.

The list of what we don't know goes on and on.

You are reading the wrong books if you think otherwise.

2 minutes ago, studiot said:

The list of what we don't know goes on and on.

Would the 3 body problem be on that list?

In order to know something do we have to be a part of the system ,and does our observation /participation intrinsically alter what we "know" about the system ?(do isolated isolated systems exist in principle or practice?)

Does the world effectively reinvent itself at each step along the way** (if "steps" exist and there is not a continuum behind every step?)

**which would also cut off at the pass any theoretical or practical extent to establish a deterministic chain of causation between events(except statistically)

1 hour ago, geordief said:

Would the 3 body problem be on that list?

In order to know something do we have to be a part of the system ,and does our observation /participation intrinsically alter what we "know" about the system ?(do isolated isolated systems exist in principle or practice?)

Does the world effectively reinvent itself at each step along the way** (if "steps" exist and there is not a continuum behind every step?)

**which would also cut off at the pass any theoretical or practical extent to establish a deterministic chain of causation between events(except statistically)

Yes the 3 body problem is difficult, but what about the many body system ? How many bodies are there in the universe ?

But no new physics or maths is needed.

It is like the problem

Solve the simultaneous equations

x + 3 = 15

x - 3 = 15

Solutions to the issues I mentioned will need new maths and/or new science.

But please don't stop thinking about it there are plenty of further examples.

7 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

“There are thoughts, therefore there is thinking”

Indeed, but how do we know that it relates to reality?

1 hour ago, Ken Fabian said:

I do suspect that fundamental physics that is correct and complete - is possible and whilst complex will not be infinitely complex. That is - of course - no more than my amateur opinion. Other opinions differ.

That's like suggesting that there's an absolutely perfect thing, at the end of the evolutionary process...

7 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

“There are thoughts, therefore there is thinking

Life is a tautology?

Life is a self relation?

The hammer is the nail and the nail is the hammer?

3 hours ago, studiot said:

The list of what we don't know goes on and on.

Exactly.
And the best we can do is use approximate solutions, like using the simplified model along with perturbations, to model these more complicated systems.
The model gets closer and closer to reality, but never quite reaches it.
( my opinion is that the model can never reach the actual reality )

4 hours ago, studiot said:

We have yet to have any full solutions in Fluid Mechanics to the Navier Stokes equations.

On and off over the last week I've been working my way through A New Approach to Estimating the Limit of Predictability that presents a theoretical absolute ceiling of 129 days to accurate weather forecasting based on considerations of quantum uncertainty in solar influx.

Abstract

We define the limit of predictability as the time period over which any information about the evolving state of a dynamical system can be retained, assuming its dynamics, the state at one point in time, and future boundary conditions are exactly known, but the quantum fluctuations of incoming energy are not. Simplistically, this time period is the sum of the period of skillful forecasts that can be made today, plus the period skill can theoretically be extended by the perfection of today’s initial conditions and models. As forecast skill is a reflection of error, predictability is contingent on the behavior of small errors never seen before. As such behavior cannot be assessed either theoretically or observationally, the limit of predictability has remained elusive. In a closed system, deterministic dynamics perfectly retains information about the state of the atmosphere, assumed to be perfectly known at the initial time, suggesting infinite predictability. In reality, incoming solar radiation, however, injects variance with unknown quantum characteristics that act as noise, destroying information first on the smallest scales. Through the upscale propagation of energy, noise eventually affects all parts of the system. When the total energy in the atmosphere is entirely replaced, any predictability as defined above is completely exhausted. Using the relatively well-measured quantities of total energy in the atmosphere and the incoming and outgoing radiation fluxes at its upper boundary, we estimate that the range of skillful forecasts could potentially be extended by 57 days at the most. Interestingly, such an extension would correspond with the addition of a similarly long, 57-day forecast period characterized by skill just below that observable in today’s forecasts. The full range of predictability then equals the sum of the two 57-day extensions and today’s skillful range of 14 days, estimated to be 129 (±7) days. By how much, and when this potential may be realized in practice, will be determined by future improvements in forecast technology.

Obvious implications for block universe and strong determinism schools of thought also.