On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 11:19:16 +0100, Martin Brown
wrote:

Back then we lacked the knowledge to know what knowledge we lacked.
That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. We have a good
understanding of where the holes in our knowledge are, and we have
good ideas about the sort of things that are likely to fill them.

And then every now and then you still get a surprise like high
temperature superconductors (though still pretty cold) and the discovery
of several new allotropes of carbon - the latter having been sat waiting
to be discovered since the first use of graphite or soot for writing.

Yeah, but those don't really surprise anybody. We almost immediately
understand them in the context of the core physics we already know.

In essence, we understand how nature works pretty well. That's
unlikely to change. The "surprises" are just our failure to recognize
consequences of what we know.