[RightWhale]

"The answer will come from a better understanding of physics."

So stated with Christian Certitude. Where are the young, radical philosophers gone? Berkeley, sure, but not all. Some are going back to the point Descartes made his fateful decision to base all on a reality of mathematical logic and geometrical physics. Go back to that crossroads and look for the other road, the one overlooked, a pure science not phenomenalism, not psychologism, not geometrism. Some shubbery might need pruning to see the road: it's an unused road.

[BioForce1]

Chemistry was a confused area of science in about 1600.

By 1900 the periodic table had cleared up most of the confusion. By 1906 the gross internal structure of all atoms was understood and by 1930 the fine structure of all atoms could be understood using very elegant mathematical models. By 1975 the internal structure of the atomic nucleus was very well understood using new mathematical models.

All physical science reduces observation to mathematics. If we could get NASA to shut down the space station and shuttle program then maybe we could start doing some real physics and astronomy and get to the bottom to how the universe really works and the largest and smallest scales.

[delapaz]

Dude!

you can't write a paragraph like that without writing 3 more paragraphs explaining what you mean by that :-).

[LibWhacker]

I'm kind of glad they've been thrown into a bit of disarray by the discovery of dark energy. I was a little disappointed back in the early 90s when everyone was saying we were on the verge of discovering a Grand Unifying Theory that would explain everything there was to explain about the universe. Better the mystery never ends, imho.

[Conspiracy Guy]

That is exactly what I was thinking. YOu beat me to it.