Of course when you said history my ears perked up. Now, the previous sentence contains an "idiom". Those that are English second language may not understand what the meaning of the phrase is though they knew the definition of every word.

We are in a similar situation in science. We keep discovering new words and we think we understand what they mean, but we may not know the total context of what it means. All we can do is build the structure one brick at a time.

Because of this thread I rewatched Roger Penrose's Princeton lectures and he covered the same material as Nereid did in her preceding post and they are correct in the point that we can not look at what we know today and have any clue as to what we will know tomorrow. We come to knowledge via many paths (pun intended), hard work and research is certainly one of the ways, but not the only one. Serendipity surely plays a role, but also remember how Sir Fred Hoyle deduced that the carbon atom had to have a resonance in a particular range. If it didn't we would not exist. And it was found to be so. Therefore the anthropic principal can play a role as well and it is Lee Smolin and, Barrow and Tipler, that have spoke to this; and of course others.

We have the tools to make progress and that is all we can hope for. If someone over reaches, we can learn from that as well. Though we can not directly test the quantum realm I would say, as Penrose would, "I wouldn't worry about that too much".