The formulae fall victim of a form of civil war: they predict that there are things which they cannot predict, observations which cannot be made, statements whose truth they can neither affirm nor deny.

From Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits by John D. Barrow, page 2. An interesting observation about the tendency to take a known truth and use it to go beyond its known limitations to make what are essentially forecasts about a desired rather than proven world.

There is an intriguing pattern to many areas of deep human inquiry. Observations of the world are made; patterns are discerned and described by mathematical formulae. The formulae predict more and more of what is seen, and our confidence in their explanatory and predictive power grows. Over a long period of time the formulae seem to be infallible: everything they predict is seen. Users of the magic formulae begin to argue that they will allow us to understand everything. The end of some branch of human inquiry seems to be in sight. Books start to be written, prizes begin to be awarded, and of the giving of popular expositions there is no end. But then something unexpected happens. It's not that the formulae are contradicted by Nature. It's not that something is seen which takes the formulae by surprise. Something much more unusual happens. The formulae fall victim of a form of civil war: they predict that there are things which they cannot predict, observations which cannot be made, statements whose truth they can neither affirm nor deny. The theory proves to be limited, not merely in its sphere of applicability, but to be self-limiting. Without ever revealing an internal inconsistency, or failing to account for something we have seen in the world, the theory produces a `no-go' statement. We shall see that only unrealistically simple scientific theories avoid this fate. Logical descriptions of complex worlds contain within themselves the seeds of their own limitation. A world that was simple enough to be fully known would be too simple to contain conscious observers who might know it.