There’s an old joke that physicists like to tell: Everything has already been discovered and reported in a Russian journal in the 1960s, we just don’t know about it. Though hyperbolic, the joke accurately captures the current state of affairs. The volume of knowledge is vast and growing quickly: The number of scientific articles posted on arXiv (the largest and most popular preprint server) in 2021 is expected to reach 190,000—and that’s just a subset of the scientific literature produced this year.It’s clear that we do not really know what we know, because nobody can read …
