The way it sort of is

摘要

We are living in a golden age of science; at least, that's what we're told. Yet compared to what scientists were doing a century ago, the human genome project seems like mere stamp collecting, while the search for a theory of everything smacks of looking for angels on the head of a pin. A century ago, Max Planck had just discovered quantum theory, Henri Poincare was laying the foundations of what would become chaos theory and Bertrand Russell had begun work that would ultimately reveal the flaky roots of mathematics. These revolutionary developments transformed science, not just in practice, but also in principle. Today no physicist seriously aspires to the god-like certainty that seemed attainable until the uncertainty principle of quantum theory shot it down. No astronomer would claim to know the position of the planets billions of years hence, chaos theory having shown the impossibility of such prescience.