> I think my subtle argument is that we've been writing for about 4,000 years, so something discovered in the last 50 years is relatively new.

Sure, but look at everything else: there's this beautifully smooth exponential curve that everybody is riding up into the stratosphere, but theoretical physicists seem to be staring up at the foundations from below.

To be fair, these are the hardest of hard problems: figuring out the substrate from the inside.

The only point I'm trying to make is that we've pushed things to the very edge of human cognitive capability. The mathematicians have figured out how to push past that with tooling. The physicists just need to find their own way to expand the boundaries with the new toys available.