...and in Europe, Einstein was finishing up General Theory, and Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Schroedinger and Dirac were unravelling the quantum. There's been a lot of scientific progress since then, but its been mostly application and technology. Nothing really fundamental has been discovered for about a century, now. Have we rounded the corner? Are we closer to getting it all figured out? Our modern understanding of nature has only had three major turning points, Galileo and Newton in the 17th/18th century, Maxwell and Darwin in the 19th, and the German Revolution in the 20th.

We like to think that science will continue to progress at this same dizzying pace indefinitely, but do we really know that? In spite of phenomenal advances in technology, physics today would be perfectly understandable to a physicist born a century ago. Sure, new discoveries are coming, but could we be approaching some limit, some place where the universe is just too complicated to untangle any further. Maybe the limiting factor isn't how long we think about it, but how much the human mind is capable of thinking.

I hope not, but I can't say for sure, and neither can anyone else. What do you think, Zoners? Maybe this is the reason for the Fermi Paradox.