And with 542 survivals, assuming Poisson statistics, the one-sigma bounds are around +-4% of that. I'll believe Spock most significant figure, but not the other three. :-)

Maxwell's equations fit in roughly 40 characters.

In particular if the success of something you opposed seemed inevitable, you'd still oppose it.

Oppose in the sense of "actively work to stop it" or oppose in the sense of, "if asked about it, note that one dislikes it"? I dislike the increase of surveillance over the decades but look: Sensors get cheaper year by year. Computation gets cheaper year by year. I'm not happy to see more surveillance, but I see it as so close to inevitable, due to the dropping costs of the enabling technologies, that actively opposing it is a waste of time and effort.

To put it another way: In the original C.S.Lewis quote, Lewis includes in his own list of questions that he wants asked: "Is it possible?" I view most of the questions that Lewis disapproves of as just being ways of asking whether recent historical evidence make something look possible or impossible in the near future. In my view, usually, claims of historical inevitability are overstated, but, occasionally (as in the cheaper sensors example), I think there are situations where a fairly solid case for at least likely trends can be made.

Whether that is good advice or not depends on the evidence already in hand, and the difficulty of the experiment. Will ice survive heating to a million kelvin at standard pressure?

Is that descriptive or normative?

Not for all aspects of reality. Some require very extreme conditions (like large, complex physics experiments like the LHC) to hit.

One of the things that other people do is to build standard parts. If one has an unlimited budget, one can ignore them, and build everything in a project from optimized custom parts. This is rare.

And stay there? Or visit it as part of, for instance, a random walk?

I'm going to be unfair here - there is a limit to how much specificity one can expect in a brief quote but: In what sense is the difficulty "mathematical in essence", and just how ignorant of how much mathematics are the physiologists in question? Consider a problem where the exact solution of the model equations turns out to be an elliptic integral - but where the practically relevant range is adequately represented by a piecewise linear approximation, or by a handful of terms in a power series. Would ignorance of the elliptic integral be a fatal flaw here?

Mostly agreed. If I were to stand on a soapbox and say "light with a wavelength of 523.4371 nm is visible to the human eye", it would fall into the category of an unsubstantiated claim by a single person. But it is implied by the general knowledge that the human visual range is from roughly 400 nm to roughly 700 nm, and that has been confirmed by anyone who has looked at a spectrum with even crude wavelength calibration.