Every age is known by its pleasures, Fielding reads from the library readout. The twentieth introduced two: high speed and hallucinogenic drugs. Both… - Gregory Benford

There was more known, but always more to be known.
Yes, she thought, and the unknown can masquerade as the unknowable.

Indeed, high-blown rhetoric plus uncheckable consequences were the two sure signatures of the crank.

Indeed, she had tried to follow books and films about science, but they featured rugged, style-conscious folk who transacted their work in ornate bars, atmospheric dens thickly mired in a high-contrast noir underworld future where bizarre ornamentation passed for any sense of newness. She had never known anybody who could design an experiment or do a calculation on table napkins, sipping hip drinks while guitar riffs wailed in the smoky background, but in movies and TV this was standard, apparently to make matters more interesting to a weary public with the attention span of a commercial. Scientists were either aggressively hip, often clad in tight leather, or else pitiful, hopeless nerds, obsessional neurotics nobody would trust for a moment with the discoveries they had, quite implausibly, ushered into the world while anxiously trying to get laid.