The vacuum as an organizational phenomenon has the disturbing logical implication that the ancient dream of commanding the ultimate power of the universe just by thinking about it is a delusion, made so not by human frailty but by the very physical processes one is trying to understand. Ironically, nature abets this delusion. It can, and often does, happen that an experiment improved to reveal an ultimate cause reveals instead emergent universality of a nearby phase transition masquerading as one. This effect is unfortunately very likely to be occurring in the vacuum of space-time, for unstable renormalizability, one of its strangest attributes, is observed in tabletop experiments to emerge very generally near phase transitions. If it is indeed the case that the vacuum is characterized by a hierarchical cascade of universalities, then all of our allegedly fundamental knowledge about it is temporary, and destined to pass away in the future as experiments improve. — R. B. Laughlin