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Paul is a first-class on the topic of what he thought would be his last painting ", and to do so, from where? What are we? Where we ?"... class reminds me thinking where scientists today are looking for a complete understanding of our universe. Scientists use mathematical hypothesis building and imagination, and try to grasp, where we come from, what we are now, where they are going out, or, more specifically, trying to determine, it is a universe, how and why it working methods, and it does, what we have, and how things can cause ruthless conscious, thinking people.           Posing the Fundamental Questions     Paul Gauguin titled what he thought would be his last painting "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"... Gauguin's reflections remind me of where scientists are today in the search for a complete understanding of our universe. Scientists work with mathematical constructions and imagine hypotheses while trying to grasp where we come from, what we are, and where were are going—or, more concretely, while trying to establish why there is a universe, how and why it works the way it does, what we are made of, and how inanimate matter can give rise to conscious, thinking people.   Every culture has asked these questions in some form and has followed some approach to provide answers. The approach that we call science has led to a remarkable set of results and answers to some of these questions, because it developed a method to study the natural world. The scientific method began with the Ionian Greeks over 2500 years ago and began to provide reliable knowledge about the world with the work of Galileo and Kepler about 400 years ago. Science makes progress by combining imagination with experimental results—by insisting on evidence.   More than one physicist, attracted by the title, has a reproduction of Gauguin's painting. But when I look at it, I don't see the answers that Gauguin perhaps had in mind, because the painting is his personal approach to those questions we all ponder. Science, on the other hand, allows many to search for answers together and to interpret the answers for whoever is interested... Science poses the same questions Gauguin and other artists ask. Its aim is to understand what lies behind the verb form to be. Though some believe otherwise, this science is not the opposite of the humanities, though it may be less readily portrayed in verbal and visual images. Quarks can't really be represented by curly beards or white togas, electromagnetic fields can't be shown as pudgy babies with wings and bows and arrows. Equations and their solutions are the representational images of the universe's structure; the circumference of a circle and the parabola described by the path of a cannon all are both precise and beautiful images of aspects of nature. If someday we have a complete set of equations, perhaps unified into one primary equation, we will have a complete mathematical image of the universe. Then we will be able to convert that to a verbal image.   Today we are at a stage where there is one main idea about the next experimentally accessible step toward understanding the basic laws that govern the universe, but it is very hard, for practical reasons, to get the evidence we need in order to learn whether the idea is correct….   It can be difficult to understand how science works, how it progresses, and how scientists working in an area become convinced an accurate description of nature (or the universe, or the world...) has been formulated. It can also be difficult to understand the results.           — Gordon L. Kane, Supersymmetry: Unveiling the Ultimate Laws of Nature                 Indexes/12