There is an existential worry I’ve had. I don’t think of it often, but it creeps up from time to time and never fully goes away. It appears in many different forms, such as the following:

• Have we already discovered the fundamentals of science? Is there much less left to discover than has already been discovered?
• Given that we’ve already globalized the world, is our sense of awe or mystery about the world permanently gone or diminished?
• In the near future, will scientists or technologists even be able to make new breakthroughs? Will everything worth discovering already be discovered? Will they be left, at best, to merely explore highly specialized niches?

I call this existential worry the death of mystery. In general, I don’t worry much about the first two bullets above, but I tend to feel the third bullet more: even if mystery is not dead yet, it often feels to me that it is dying.

But today, I had an epiphany that clarified this fear of mine and gave me strong reason to believe that the fear is much more of an illusion than I originally thought.

I got this epiphany while reading The Myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik J. Larson. To give some context, the thesis of the