Reading the latest issue of Scientific American earlier today I spotted the following two items reprinted from their September 1958 issue.

The first is from the great thinker Jacob Bronowski, who older UK readers may remember for his 1973 TV series The Ascent of Man. As usual Bronowski is right on the money:

THE CREATIVE PROCESS
The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

The second, equally revealing but in a different way, is from eminent physicist Freeman Dyson. While many discoveries and developments have been made in particle physics and cosmology in the last 50 years, I think this statement is still true today:

INNOVATION IN PHYSICS
My view, the skeptical one, holds that we may be as far away from an understanding of elementary particles as Newton’s successors were from quantum mechanics. Like them, we have two tremendous tasks ahead of us. One is to study and explore the mathematics of the existing theories. The existing quantum field-theories may or may not be correct, but they certainly conceal mathematical depths which will take the genius of an Euler or a Hamilton to plumb. Our second task is to press on with the exploration of the wide range of physical phenomena of which the existing theories take no account. This means pressing on with experiments in the fashionable area of particle physics. Outstanding among the areas of physics which have been left out of recent theories of elementary particles are gravitation and cosmology.