[Cavernio]

Well, I disagree with studmuffin. Firstly, as far as we know, space isn't infinite. Also, by you saying that atoms are far too small to 'weigh' as some sort of support for what you say, it isn't really, because from what you're saying, weighing something isn't a means of being certain of something anyways. Neither is seeing, or touching, or anything else. I'm sure there's a philosophical term for your stance muffin, if I just studied any philosophy. Also, the size of atoms has been extrapolated from other measures beyond 'weighing'. No, I don't know what they are. Yes, I have 'faith' that they're correct.

More into line with what cob was saying, and tying in with what muffin said, if we somehow manage to create something or do something by using the information that science has given us so far, then that to me marks success for science. For example, the knowledge of the forces of the world is and how it affects things in outer space, has caused us to successfully do things like make space stations, have satellites, and launch space shuttles. These are things we knew how to do not because they were done before, or something we managed to explain, but something we tried based on the what we've learned from other things. Nothing close to such successes have happened in social sciences. And this doesn't necessarily mean that things like that won't happen, but it is something to contemplate.
But for things like the social sciences, and societal problems, the way science is going with them right now is not necessarily going to work, I don't think. As Kuhn points out in some other works of his (I think its him, it might've been someone else who just used Kuhn's ideas), social sciences simply like to adopt certain stances on a few dichotomous ideas, and those together make up the 'paradigm of the day' so to speak. Right now, social science is very much like other science. One of these ideas it has is to be reductionist instead of holistic. As anyone who has ever stopped to think about why people do certain things, why societies and politics work the way they do, there are sooo many factors involved. The tree you'd need to code to create something akin to society or even an individual, would be astronomical. Even if we do find all the information needed to create, for lack of a term, an artificial society, no one would be able to understand it enough to do anything with it. This next part is something which has been floating around in my mind for awhile actually, and it's about knowledge which exists compared to knowledge a person has. There's so much information out there, so much fact and science, that individually, we will never be able to grasp it all. I just see this reductionist version of social science becoming something like that. All the information there, but no one who comprehends it all, and no one able to explain it all. And in a way, that's kinda the state we're in BEFORE we ever start analyzing things. We know holistically a lot of things, we know there's information and data out there, but we just haven't discovered it yet. But if we can't access it or understand it once it's already 'discovered', we're in the same boat.
By choosing to not be so reductionist in our perception of things, by choosing to holistically create new meaning to clumps of things, we automatically by-pass having to know the finer details of something in order to understand it. But in the same way that I feel reducing social sciences will bring them to a level beyond our comprehension, I can also see the opposite happening, where information could become, uh, too holistic, and again pass beyond our grasp of understanding.

I read in one of my 4th year psychology seminars (where I also happened to learn and read about Kuhn), that someone who understands people and society enough to be able to write a play or a novel that makes sense to the audience, has grasped the most important aspect of people. This struck me, partially because it fit into my own, unvoiced opinion that the level of training necessary to become a psychologist (therapist) isn't necessarily going to make someone a good psychologist, and also because it just makes so much sense while downplaying the benefit of psychology, yet said by a psychologist.

As far as being able to solve the problems of society? I don't think anything will be able to solve our problems, but then again, that's probably me being far too general.