That's the one thing. And I can't shake it off.
There is nothing to shake off when it comes to science. If good science led us to wrong answers it is because of insufficient data, bad process, and human error. Science is the best tool we have ever created. Just look at your smartphone. The transistors in that thing are not individually visible with the human eye but you can post your selfies to snapchat just fine right? Right. Those transistors are measured in nanometers.
Stay Calm
and
Keep Doing Science
There is no reason to believe we will never ever find out some fundamental properties of the world, given enough time. If something exists, it can be interacted with and if it can be interacted with, it can be studied. If we can't interact with it ourselves, we'll make machines to interact with it. If we cannot make machines to interact with it, we'll study the results of other things interacting with it that we can observe. If it cannot be interacted with in any way via any method, its existence is largely a philosophical question.
It can be argued that we don't (and won't) have the absolute most simple, exact and perfect formulations for the rules of nature, but arguing whether those rules have a one true form and if there aren't equivalent ways to state them is again a largely philosophical question.
if the universe keeps expanding, eventually it will expand at the speed of light and everything that is not gravitationally locked with us (wich only includes the milky way and about 5 or so other galaixies) will be moving faster than the speed of light and will be impossible to observe in any way.
in a sense, it means leo is actually wrong. if an intelligent race comes into being after said event, it could be true that no amount of science will ever be able to show that the rest of the universe existed. that also means some other phenomenon may have occurred that will make us as just as useless at understanding what happened as ants are at knowing/exploring the stars.
that is, if certain theories about the expansion of the galaxy is true.
Of course, the ones in your backyard typically don't do that. Those are like boring human villages.
You could say that about many humans too right now, and certainly all humans up until the last however many years.
http://www.fountainmagazine.com/Issue/detail/Collective-Inte...
Are we sure that Einstein's law of gravity is the really 'correct' one or the 'last' one we will discover? Nope. Indeed, that doubt is part of why the article got so excited about using one black hole orbiting another one to "test" Einstein's law of gravity. We keep testing that law because we will learn something, either (1) something doesn't fit and we have to ditch the law or (2) the law fits and we gain more 'confidence' in the law.
You can look at it this way: The stuff we 'accept' now is what we have dreamed up and that has passed some apparently 'significant' (don't mean statistics here) tests and so far never really failed a test. Net, stuff 'accepted' at present is what appears to work so far.
But, in physics and cosmology, we have some issues that, at least intuitively, appear to be potential biggies: (1) What happened before the big bang? Can we get some clues from the data we have on what might have happened before the big bang -- some physicists have tried to look. (2) What's with this stuff about dark energy and dark matter? (3) Why does it appear that there is much more matter than anti-matter? (4) What's with neutrinos and how they 'change'? (5) What can we dig out of 'spooky action at a distance', that is, Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox?
So, maybe more progress understanding one of these biggies will cause us to ditch some of our currently 'accepted' results, look for, and maybe find some new results.
Could everything we have seen so far be just some light show put on just for our amusement? We can't say. So far, it appears that somehow mathematics works shockingly well; why? We don't know.
That there is a law of gravity that works as well as even Newton's might be seen as surprising. That is, why doesn't the 'law of gravity' change each 10 minutes? Well, some things do change 'randomly', and for them the only laws we have are probabilistic. Newton's law is not probabilistic because so far it appears to work the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, that is, doesn't change. Or our science is what we have found that in some important sense doesn't change, e.g., we can 'reproduce' results. Why are such results possible? Not at all clear.
Even if what we are seeing is just some light show for our amusement, still we get some utility, e.g., via applications to engineering, etc. So, the Internet works because Maxwell's equations of electro-magnetism continue to work as they have for 100+ years now.
> And I can't shake it off.
Relax and enjoy the light show or whatever the heck it is. There's a lot to be amazed about, curious about, etc. And we really do make progress, astounding progress. E.g., we've made a lot of progress since I studied physics i college. The math I studied has been more stable!