[cageface]

It may be true that it's harder now to make those kinds of leaps than it was in the 1970s though.

[gaius]

Why?

I mean, everything is obvious in retrospect. I'm sure there were some PARC guys bemoaning that all the fundamental discoveries were already made in the 1950s... Google today probably has bigger budgets than Xerox had then (tho' that's just a guess on my part)

[cageface]

A lot of discoveries get exponentially harder. Compare the LHC to experiments people were doing 100 years ago for an extreme example.

[oh_sigh]

Evidence of this assertion?

[cageface]

It's a speculation, not an assertion. But it's a speculation many well-informed scientists have made in the last few years.

For example: http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/02/07/the-difficulty-...