Science: Can We Really Understand Matter?

Few tasks are more daunting than standing in the path of a charging theoretical physicist who is hell-bent on getting funding for the next particle accelerator. As practitioners of the hardest of the hard sciences, physicists do little to discourage their aura of intellectual supremacy, particularly when suggesting to Congress that a grand synthesis of all the forces of nature is at hand if the Government will only cough up a few billion dollars more. But what if this confidence is misplaced? What if the barriers to knowledge are higher than many physicists like to admit?

For much of this century,...

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