yah, as an engineer[0], i totally get the solvability angle, and even the physicist's core desire to be able to test (and predict via) the math rather than the physical manifestations (which may be impossible to test directly), but i'm eager to see us advance deeper into the non-linear, since that's where it gets really interesting. like, how do proteins really work? or multi-body energy fields? we're in the infancy of really understanding all this stuff. the future is stochastic and non-linear. in a thousand years, people might look back with amusement on how ignorant we were with our puny little linear models and deterministic computers. =)

[0]: but at this point, not really. even in grad school, i only did linear modeling, and relatively rudimentary ones, at that.