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There are some serious inconsistencies in saying that science is bumping up against fundamental limits, beyond which it cannot progress. First, if there are fundamental limits, then these limits must result from a theoretical context. The theories that imply the limitations will either be testable, and therefore result in tentative confirmations of our knowledge, or they will be untestable, which is itself a tentative circumstance. Since what can be tested today may have been impossible to imagine a hundred years ago, what will be possible to test in the future is likely unimaginable to us, today.
Fundamental limits of knowledge would either be eternal, unchallengeable truths (physical laws, absolute givens, perfect constants) or unfathomable mysteries (irreconcilable paradoxes, quintessential accidents, purely random phenomena). Experience shows that we are poor predictors of such limitations, in either case. What have appeared to be fixed and immutable have flexed and broken with the birth of new conceptions. What have appeared utterly incomprensible by human understanding have suddenly exploded in unpredictable and awesome theoretical insights, such as those of Darwin and Einstein.
To claim that science is capable of defining its own limitations is to misunderstand the very nature of the scientific enterprise. It is not to find solutions to our problems or to tie down the loose ends of our understanding. Rather, it is to dispose of whatever conceptions have become untenable and to provide a means of conceiving and testing new ideas.
Stasis is impossible, unless science is undermined by comfortable superstitions, such as the notion that we are coming to the end of what is knowable. The Big Idea cannot be a single notion. It is the scientific project, itself.
