Science is among the most visionary of all human endeavors. Nevertheless, speculations about the future of science are invariably wrong-usually because progress exceeds expectations. A sense of history can provide a perspective for thinking about the future, even though history never repeats itself-at  least not in science.  At the end of the 19th century, for instance, progress in science was widely celebrated. In retrospect, there should have been widespread dismay because all understanding of matter was empirical. In the 1920s the creation of quantum mechanics suddenly provided a fundamental theory for the structure of matter. That creation transformed science and society in ways that no one could possibly have imagined. Today, at the end of the 20th century, progress in science is being widely celebrated. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that our understanding of the structure of matter remains fundamentally empirical. What might be the ultimate impact of achieving a much
deeper understanding