What this painting is trying to portray is that human knowledge towards sciences is very limited. We suspect only a shadow of the compositions and the laws that are surrounding us. We make models, formulas and try to understand as far as we can. But how much do we really know? Are we even asking ourselves the right questions?
As we can see, although a lot of data and information are right in front of the little boy, he can only understand very few about what the books are really trying to say. His knowledge is restricted; he is just capable of only suspecting a few arrangements, and formulating some hypothesis by looking at the images in the books. He might try to study it for a lifetime, but he will never grasp the complete meaning. The universe that we see on the top part is a contrast with the library. It is a metaphor which shows that the universe is to humanity what the books are to the little boy. The universe is what seems to be everything: the source of all our questions, and possibly the source of most of the answers. Humans have an unrestricted desire to know. Nevertheless, he can only create a few hypothesis and theories by analyzing what he can grasp with the five senses that have been provided to him. Thus we can conclude that humans have a certain limitation.
The message given by the larger scale of the data, the universe, can also be a paralleled to the absolutely small, the quantum world. Thus, we come to our concept of quantum mechanics where the world of the absolutely small becomes significant. Scientists have struggled into the study of the quantum realm throughout ages. What they have concluded is that they are not in a position to observe electrons without interacting with them, thus disturbing their normal behaviour. This brings us to the controversy of wave-particle duality. In this world, both of the possibilities are accepted, since we cannot go any further with our data. It transgresses our common sense; therefore we cannot be sure of its nature. It is not yet in our ability to grasp its total meaning. We can only speculate by the behaviour of the electrons, seen in the larger scale. Like the little boy, we can only create theorems and work with what we can: what our senses and our capacity let us comprehend.
To conclude, every single research and knowledge cannot be set in stone. Most of the things are speculations and interpretations, since we can only see as far as the horizon lets us. One thing we can be sure without any doubt is that there is more to life than we think.
This painting is primarily a personal interpretation of the following quote by Einstein:
"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is." (Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer, Princeton University Press)
*http://www.deism.com/einstein.htm (date not mentioned)