NO, we CAN'T ever really understand the universe!!
it's NEVER gonna happen!
Not in a million years even supposing we still exist in that time and our intelligence and population of the scientific community increase 1,000,000-fold.
Why??  Because I'm making it up as I go along!!  BUAHAHAHAHAHA
no, just kidding.
Firstly, the reason we can never understand _everything_ is very simple.
NO matter how much we evolve or increase in numbers, the total mass of one or even all of our brains will probably be infinitessimally small compared to the universe.  So logically mankind just cannot know/contain that amount of information no matter what the psychonomy.  Not in one mind, not in all of our minds collectively, and not even in holographic harddrives.  We will always think in terms of an extremely limited set of extremely general abstractions with respect to the entire universe, and probably even with respect to Planet Earth.
Secondly, one may consider 'understanding the universe' as understanding all of the laws 'governing' the universe.  Can we even understand the universe in THIS sense?  NO!!  SORRY!! YOU LOSE!
Why?  Because ultimately the universe exists as a singularity.  We make arbitrary differentiations among 'objects' and among 'aspects' and other types of abstractions, but at some point 'information' and 'physical laws', or causal relationships among data, and even time and causality itself, must intermingle like time and space.  This means that the further down we look for physical laws, the more we're going to find, because information and its nature of interaction don't exist separately outside of our consciousness.  The universe is as the universe does.  The endless search for more superceding physical laws (both smaller (more fundamental, e.g. QM) and larger (more encompassing, e.g. relativity) in scale of application) will endlessly yield more abstractions based on the absolute information/interaction (i.e., matter/laws) singularity.

But that's just my opinion.

Richard A. Nichols III

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