Sad to say, but many physicists seem to be on
the verge of giving up. Some think they’ll never know how the universe came to
be, The multiverse is basically a cop-out, an excuse for abandoning the search
for answers. The other big bugaboo is consciousness. As John Horgan reports on Scientific American’s Cross-Check, no less a superstar than
Edward Witten now believes that consciousness “will remain a mystery.” All this
pessimism comes as a result of many decades of failure to make significant
progress on the hard questions.
