Joe Jacobs

Nobel Prize Winners Age Statistics.

In 1965 Richard Feynman, prescient as always, prophesied that science would reach its impasse. “The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again.” After the great truths are revealed, Feynman continued, “there will be a degeneration of ideas, just like the degeneration that great explorers feel is occurring when tourists begin moving in on a new territory.”

Indeed, by 1970s, the researchers have already mapped out the entire universe, from the microrealm of quarks and electrons to the macrorealm of galaxies and quasars. Physicists have shown that all matter is composed of a few elementary particles ruled by a few basic forces. Scientists have also woven their knowledge into an impressive, albeit incomplete, narrative of how we came to be. The universe exploded into existence 15 billion years ago, give or take five billion years, and is still expanding. Some 4.5 billion years ago, the detritus of a supernova condensed into our solar system. During the next few hundred million years, single-celled organisms bearing an ingenious molecule called DNA emerged on this planet. These primordial microbes gave rise, by means of natural selection, to an extraordinary array of more complex creatures, including Homo sapiens.

 

Everything that could be discovered has been discovered; everything that needed to be explained has been explained; there is nothing left for science to do but to slowly decay or, as Feynman would put it, “degenerate.” Case closed.