Given that every time we discover something new we find that there are more questions than answers, I find it hard to believe that the process should converge some day.
every time we discover something new we find that there are more questions than answers
I don’t think that’s really true though. The advances in physics that have been worth celebrating—Newtonian mechanics, Maxwellian electromagnetism, Einsteinian relativity, the electroweak theory, QCD, etc.--have been those that answer lots and lots of questions at once and raise only a few new questions like “why this theory?” and “what about higher energies?”. Now we’re at the point where the Standard Model and GR together answer almost any question you can ask about how the world works, and there are relatively few questions remaining, like the problem of quantum gravity. Think how much more narrow and neatly-posed this problem is compared to the pre-Newtonian problem of explaining all of Nature!
Given that every time we discover something new we find that there are more questions than answers, I find it hard to believe that the process should converge some day.
I don’t think that’s really true though. The advances in physics that have been worth celebrating—Newtonian mechanics, Maxwellian electromagnetism, Einsteinian relativity, the electroweak theory, QCD, etc.--have been those that answer lots and lots of questions at once and raise only a few new questions like “why this theory?” and “what about higher energies?”. Now we’re at the point where the Standard Model and GR together answer almost any question you can ask about how the world works, and there are relatively few questions remaining, like the problem of quantum gravity. Think how much more narrow and neatly-posed this problem is compared to the pre-Newtonian problem of explaining all of Nature!