Over the last few decades, physics in the grand mode practiced by Hawking and Rees has become increasingly disconnected from empirical evidence. Prop… - John Horgan

In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific. Physicists want to show that all things came from one thing: a force, or essence, or membrane wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their search for this primordial symmetry, however, physicists have gone off the deep end, postulating particles and energies and dimensions whose existence can never be experimentally verified.

Kuhn's recognition that science might cease—leaving us with what Charles Sanders Peirce had defined as the "truth" about nature—made it even more imperative for Kuhn than for Popper to challenge science's authority, to deny that science can ever arrive at absolute truth. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said. "Because that's not what I think the game is about."

Science has only existed for a few hundred years, and its most spectacular achievements have occurred within the last century. Viewed from a historical perspective, the modern era of rapid scientific and technological progress appears to be not a permanent feature of reality, but an abberation, a fluke, a product of a singular convergence of social, intellectual, and political factors.