Throughout human history, our understanding of the natural world has grown exponentially through scientific inquiry. This remarkable progress has led many to conclude that science will eventually explain everything, reducing all mysteries to well-understood physical processes. However, this conclusion relies on a dangerous form of extrapolation that fails to account for recent developments in our understanding of knowledge itself.

When analyzing any system, mathematics allows us to estimate unknown values through interpolation – predicting behavior between known data points. While this approach is generally reliable, extending predictions beyond known observations through extrapolation is far more precarious. This distinction becomes crucial when we examine our assumptions about the future of scientific knowledge.