The number of new discoveries seems to accelerate.
Which means we are accelerating to the time when the last discovery will be finally announced.
There has to be a last discovery. The number of discoverable science facts is not infinite, is it?
That's a good question. A good question which, I suspect, is unanswerable. The reason? -- we don't know what we don't know. (If we know that we don't know something, we can make that the subject of our research, but we can't research something that we don't even know exists as a subject to study.)
Now to the point. What if the number of discoverable science facts is not infinite. What if some day, say 50 years from now, all of the scientists come together and announce that every single significant discovery has been made.
What then? What do scientists do starting the next day after that big announcement.
I want you to know that this is a think piece that I don't have an answer. I just think that pondering whether there will ever be a final discovery lets us get a clearer picture of who we (humans) are and what we do.
We are discoverers, searchers, pioneers. It is in our blood and our souls.
Suppose, however, that final scientific discovery had been made 50 years ago today. What would we be doing now?
Who would we be?
Go look in the mirror, pioneer.
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