Proverbial prospective student of apocryphal professor asks,
"if I'm to study, I ought know: what IS this physics you propound in class?"
The scholar from his bookcase withdrew a volume vast,
parading on its leaves equation, diagram and graph.
The student nodded ken, but then received a gentle laugh,
and looked with some confusion as the teacher loosed his grasp,
causing the tome to strike the desk with a resounding blast.
"Young fellow, THAT is physics," the professor said at last.
 
Believing with Wilde that higher criticism is not merely the most sincere, but perhaps the
only civilised form of autobiography, I approach science not as a discipline to be mastered,
nor a profession to embark upon (though discipline its cornerstone, and professionalism its
hallmark) but under the dictum of Delphi: "know thyself". For it is in appreciation of the
pristine beauty and elegant efficiency of natural process that we, through stops and starts,
have furthered the great commission of Nature, even as we have bent her to our whim. Our
double sapience, highest conquest of which we know, though far from the summit of Mount
Improbable, gives to Nature a non-orientability -- through that imperfect though
endlessly-refining way we allow her to contain herself -- and thus increases her dimension.
And blessed with ambition to pace our faculty, we did not content ourselves to passively
reflect in our fourteen-hundred grams the vastness of the cosmos, nor confine to island states
those perceptions of verity, but let slip from mortal leash our model of the world, so that
the opus might outlive three-score and ten.
Thus by our proxy, Nature understands herself, and we recurse in kind and reciprocity. Our
investigation of external reality has given birth to a mathematics that is at once a product
of our own creative function, and simultaneously dares endeavor to contain it. The model of
our invention, yield of our humble microcosm, describes that totality which through lengthy
machinations gave rise to itself. Our ongoing critique of the universe then, possible only
that we are possessed of "a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty", might be
considered the very memoir of the Old One himself. But I would argue against such finalism,
and propose rather that we, as scientists, represent not the culmination of an autobiography,
but the germination of its seed -- that is to say, the first moment at which the cosmic infant
grasps the notion of itself, and tastes the fruit of sentience.
So it is with an irony to which I pray never to become accustomed, that as a species we stand
on the greatest threshold of self-knowledge in all our history. Just as the sensibility to
pattern and order that predicates the creation of a world within allowed the analysis of the
world without, the legacy of such analysis has curved upon itself to pierce the nature of its
author. This reentrancy of our comprehensive manifold becomes the next layer of cosmological
self-reference: as physics gives rise to biology that it may model physics, biology gives rise
to cognition that it may model biology.
Here again, the temptation arises to consider ourselves in the position of quasi-literate
narrators, puzzling upon a great work of history, that we might at last recite to ourselves
the heritage we have long imagined. But to believe that our decipherment of the book of life
ends at its terminal chapter betrays the same poverty of imagination evinced by faith in
proximal discovery of the final laws of nature -- the cryptotheology of the theory of
everything. Far from it, I say, we stand in respect to ourselves in that selfsame position as
the universe to itself: at an infantile crux, wherefrom with first apprehension of what we
are, we shall proceed into the mystery of becoming something far greater.

“Our investigation of external reality has given birth to a mathematics that is at once a product of our own creative function, and simultaneously dares endeavor to contain it.”

You argue against the finalism that comes from application of the metaphor, but make no clear attempts to either critique or indeed extirpate the root, the metaphor itself. People dare to believe that mathmatics endeavours to contain all things only as they dare also to play Russian roulette in a haze of tungsten arc light and absinthe.

“This reentrancy of our comprehensive manifold becomes the next layer of cosmological self-reference: as physics gives rise to biology that it may model physics, biology gives rise to cognition that it may model biology.”

And, like a hall of mirrors...

“Far from it, I say, we stand in respect to ourselves in that selfsame position as the universe to itself: at an infantile crux”

That we may have great things ahead of us is to deny great things that we have been through, and I speak of things as disparate as The Odyssey and the scientific method. The greatest invention of mankind may, in a sense, be the scientific method. It did not, of course bootstrap itself: there was no chicken to lay the chicken egg of science. The first scientist was no scientist, and also therefore the best scientist.

If progress means getting stupid things done more efficiently, this is a kind of progress we may wish to opt out of. There are, no doubt, great things to come. There are, no doubt, things that we can say, and do, and accomplish which are great. When you are careful to show that there is no goal and much opportunity, you must be careful not to have that opportunity, a lump of rock by day, turn into a castle of iniquity by the same gleam of twilight that our natural philosophers made such use of.