Finding that theory is hard to find for our current knowledge and capabilities. But extrapolating that this will remain so will not age well.
On the other hand, have you ever tried to explain even the most elementary concepts of basic special relativity to a crow? Crows are intelligent and can reason about problems, but special relativity is just beyond them no matter how long you try to teach them, and it seems likely that this is something crows will never be able to understand. At best some distant descendant of crows that has evolved so much from present day crows to be a completely new species might get it.
I see no reason to assume that the capabilities required to completely understand physics fall somewhere between the limits of crow intelligence and the limits of human intelligence.
Could one could also argue that quantum indeterminacy makes it difficult make predictions the more interactions you add to a system? That is, interactions at the atomic and subatomic levels are manageable enough to observe, but as we add actors, the interactions grow exponentially, and each actor's state is influenced not just by itself but by other actors in the system, ad infinitum.
> I'm not convinced that comparing two different states of matter is a useful comparison.
Don't forget that the universe itself has undergone a phase transition, after (or during, depending on who's lecturing) the inflation period (very shortly after the big bang).
I prefer calling it a vacuum collapse, 'cause that's what it was. "Phase transition" sounds too clinical.
Always wondered if there's any chance there may have been some form of life existing prior to reheating. It's not as though we have any way to find out, unfortunately.
> "Phase transition" sounds too clinical.
What does "vacuum collapse" mean? No matter how I try to interpret it, I cannot come up with anything that resembles the cosmic inflation.
The problem is we're not sure that's what caused reheating. There's been other suggestions, some of them quite exotic -- a collision with a neighbouring brane, for instance. Still, my bet's on false vacuum decay.
Do you think we will be able to grow capabilities indefinitely ? For example, let's imagine we know how to build a detector for some phenomenon. For some reason we need to go to another star (for example, to mine all of its planet for some unobtainiun). Then we would be stuck in our progress...
I'm not in physics but is there lot of room to improve our capabilities left ?