There is a hope, which I nurse but I don't see being realized, that eventually we'll find that quantum mechanics as we know it now is just an approxi… - Steven Weinberg

It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.

There is one constant that seems to be fine tuned...and that is dark energy.

By the end of the nineteenth century the idea of the atom had become familiar... but not yet universally accepted. Partly because of the heritage of Newton and Dalton, there was a disposition to use atomic theories in England. ...Resistance to atomism persisted in Germany ...under the influence of an empiricist school... centered on Ernst Mach... many [German physicists and chemists] held back from incorporating into... theories anything that—like atoms—could not be observed directly. ...It is said that the opposition to Boltzmann's work by the followers of Mach contributed to Boltzmann's suicide...