for a few hundred years post Newton it looked like mathematics could be completed and physics would soon neatly explain how our universe works in an elegant mathematical form that the rational mind could intuitively grasp. Maxwell for example was sure that we were only a few decades away from achieving this. heading into the 20th century, everybody believed there would soon be a complete triumph of the rational mind over the mysteries of nature. but as we all know, none of that came to pass...
the 20th century was a huge wake up call for the limitations of science, mathematics, and the rational mind to provide an adequate explanation of how nature works in any fundamental sense. mathematics is now known to be inherently incomplete for any given set of axioms, with different subsets of provable statements, and physics completely splintered apart into incompatible theories based on opposing assumptions. physics students are told to "shut up & calculate", theory & experiment detached...
of course it did: academic jobs and careers literally depended on it not changing. essentially all of the original programs that physics and mathematics had adopted to fully characterize natural were never achieved. and yet after some initial head scratching, overall nothing was really modified in the way these subjects are taught or how their academic departments are structured. pedagogically, students are still taught the same basic rubric as their predecessors were 100 years ago. but...
i predict that science will eventually evolve beyond the (in hindsight) naive and wishful thinking of the past. it may take generations, maybe hundreds of years, but mathematicians and scientists will eventually realize that being in denial of their past failures looks bad. one of the first lessons students should be taught is that past naive and wishful thinking was coupled with a fair amount of hubris, arrogance, and ignorance. the power of science & mathematics lies not in explaining nature..
as the saying goes, "time will tell", and almost a century after Heisenberg's "magical" Umdeutung paper, it certainly appears most likely that nature will forever remain inexplicable. in the end, philosophers have gotten the last laugh. perhaps someday we will even be able to prove the incompleteness of physics, analogously to the incompleteness of mathematics. i hope so, because that would apply some additional forces on the stubborn academic departments that are so set in their outdated ways..
instead, for now science has become "big science" and has largely been absorbed into the military-industrial complex that so much of society serves. yes, in reality military defense of nation-states is a necessity for survival of a civilian population, and that doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon. so where does that leave us? if the power of science is not in explaining nature at a fundamental, what purpose does it serve? i believe the answer is twofold: first of all, to paraphrase Tukey..
@katchwreck Well that's not true.
A whole lot of science funding is not only separate from military spending but actually looking for military spending but not getting it.
@volkris but would these institutions exist without past military funding? historically, every aspect of post-WWII science and engineering goes back to military applications. even before WWII, the very first technology industry was radio, was largely funded by military sales. the entire system of funding we have now grew out of the need for better weapons during WWII. after the way, the military basically said "we want to keep this up" and gave all of the big academic labs a lot of money.