The super-void, that presented itself in the background
radiation, sporting a size of close to two billion light years, has baffled
scientists. A few years after its discovery, no reasonable explanation is
forthcoming. The standard model, that most still pin their research on, has
shown so many cracks that scientists who adhere to it are beginning to look
like economists, who have similar difficulty letting go of established
theories. Hunting in the particle forest, either to propose new ones or to
prove the hypothesized ones indeed exist, has been the favorite past-time of
physicists. Recently, they even measured the reverberation of gravity waves,
generated by an event over billion years ago, to the tune of the diameter of a
proton. Now, it is nearly impossible to disprove anything in Physics.
Biologists and chemists are in the same spot. Technology is
advancing so fast that scientists are running out of hypotheses to prove. There
are so many engineers and technologists, pumped out by the elite educational
institutions around the world, who stand ready to prove anything in science. We
are fast approaching a regime of dearth of ideas and an oversupply of proofs.
Is this what was envisioned a few decades ago by visionary scientists, who
predicted a future in which there would be nothing more to prove. If so, it
would be bleak, indeed.
Creating hypotheses, a skill that was left undernourished
for a few decades, may need to be brought back.
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