The big questions of science

Here one has to turn to relativity physics, quantum mechanics and field-theory, which overturned the secure world of Newtonian physics when they first emerged at the beginning of the 20th century in the work of Einstein, Niels Bohr and others.

Few scientists today would believe, as physicist William Thomson did in 1900, that only two little problems remained to be resolved in the discipline, namely those concerning the properties of light, and "black body-radiation" — both of which were resolved by relativity physics and quantum theory a few years later, but not without opening up new areas of investigation.

Schramm observes that the current situation in biology is comparable to that which existed in physics a hundred years ago: contrary to expectations after the 2003-decipherment of the human genome, knowledge of human beings in this field is, all of a sudden, not worth that much any longer.