Many of us take it for granted that science will just go on and on, as long as humankind continues to flourish. I certainly do. But Russell Stannard, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Open University, gives three reasons for thinking that what he calls fundamental science - 'the process of understanding the basic laws of nature, what the world and ourselves are made of, and how things come to be the way they are' - must one day come to an end. In summary these reasons are: (1) There are likely to be limits to our brain capacity that prevent us from being able to understand all there is to understand. (2) There could be practical obstacles (such as with our feasible instruments of observation) that limit what we can examine or measure. (3) We may come up against the 'boundaries of the knowable', against questions that are simply unanswerable.
I don't have the benefit of being a physicist; I don't even have any scientific education beyond what I learned not too well up to (roughly) O-level. But I make so bold as to say why I am sceptical of the idea of an end to science. It has nothing to do with thinking either that there could be a knowledge of the world which was complete, or with a presumption that human intelligence might be of unlimited power. It is a combination, rather, of two things. First, it is impossible for us to predict in advance how any new piece of scientific knowledge, any new information about the constituents of reality, will affect our ability to explore things further. Second, it is surely the case that new theoretical frameworks and assumptions - new ways of thinking about things - can always open up fields of research that previously wouldn't even have been recognized by us. A body of totally static and finished knowledge seems to me incompatible with all human experience to date. That's my sixpenceworth anyway.
