Will the question/answer ratio ever stop climbing?

It wasn’t so long ago that the human race knew almost nothing about the world we live on or the solar system it’s a part of. And other than seeing the light of stars, we knew absolutely nothing about our galaxy or the hundreds of billions of other galaxies beyond it. But human minds evolved to find relationships and see cause and effect. Survival of hunter gathers on the African Savannah relied on being able to do this. So we turned our creative mind toward explaining what we saw. The earth was obviously flat, and thus it had edges somewhere that one must avoid falling off of. Different cultures assigned different deities the responsibility for the big things, like moving the Sun across the sky each day, and back around under the Earth so it was ready for the next day’s transit. Likewise, this or that god moved the moon, the planets, and the outer dome the stars were set in. Thunder and lightning were produced by an angry god in some cultures, and by gods or demigods fighting each others. Lesser events like illness, crop failures and such were obviously caused by witches, demons, curses and the like.

But then bit by bit, careful observation showed that the Earth is not flat but more like a large globe. Observation showed that the Sun does not go around the Earth. Instead, the Earth spins on its axis, making the Sun appear to rise and set. Each new observation raised more questions. Why do the Earth and planets orbit the Sun? Why does our Moon orbit the Earth? Isaac Newton turned his brilliant mind to those questions. He recognized that there must be a force that causes an apple to fall from a tree and that holds him fixed to the ground. He called this force gravity, and realized that it must be a property of any object having mass, and project out from that object, decreasing in force as the root mean square of the distance from the object’s center. This force, countering momentum, was what bent the planets and their moons in their respective orbits, he reasoned. To prove this, he had to develop a whole new math called differential calculus. Using his new math, he was able to check his assumptions and very accurately predict the orbits of the observable celestial objects. He could also use his new tools to predict the path a cannon ball would follow.

But Newtonian Physics raised new questions. What produces gravity? Why does the planet Mercury not follow Newtonian physics exactly? Why is its orbit just a little bit off? Nobody provided much in answers to these questions till Albert Einstein turned his massive intellect toward solving them, and published his papers on Special and General Relativity. Einstein answered Newton’s questions, but many more questions flowed out of his answers. If a large mass produces gravity by warping space, what is space, and how does mass act upon it? What conveys its force? How does it apply at very small scales like the atom? From that last question alone, the whole world of quantum mechanics emerged with a bewildering host of new questions.

Now, every new answer seems to open a thousand new questions. Do you think that questions are a zero-sum equation, or an infinite sum equation? Will we ever begin to fill in all the answers, or will every new answer always raise more questions?