Will science ever reach an end?

End of the road

Source: © Shutterstock

While the rate of discoveries in any field may slow over time, the frontier creeps ever further

Finding out new things about nature’s workings and applying these to our wants and needs is such a feature of life in the industrialised world that it’s easy to forget that for most of human history there was (broadly speaking) no organised scientific enterprise at all. Vannevar Bush famously called science the Endless Frontier, and he may well have been right. But that phrase comes with no guarantees that this frontier will remain endlessly accessible.