So Asimov says this: "It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basi

So Asimov says this: "It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight." Whatever misconceptions our English major has about how science works, this strikes me as incredibly unlikely. If you believe in the law of accelerating returns, then it's almost infinitely unlikely — that the number of scientific revolutions yet to come is vastly larger than of those already past. So it's certainly not correct to say that we had "got it wrong" before, as if each attempt is like rolling the dice all over. It's also wrong (though, as he says, not AS wrong) to say that we've "finally" got it "straight".