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Your comment and the replies are basically just disagreeing about semantics. In basically any use of the word "physics" for organizations (like "physics departments", "Nobel prize in physics", the "American Physical Society"), "physics" is a discipline which is much broader than simply the search for new fundamental physical laws. It basically includes any field that uses the training and techniques useful for searching for new fundamental physical laws. For example: condensed matter, optics, astronomy, astrophysics, quantum computing. That is, physics organizations (like most academic organizations) are united by a common set of training and techniques, not a common objective. This is just a fact about the useful way to organize human beings. But, if you are defining "physics" to mean "fundamental physics"---i.e. new laws of nature--then... (1) There hasn't been a confirmed theoretical physics discovery since 1967 when the Higgs mechanisms completed the Standard Model (although some might argue that the profoundly new understanding of existing fundamental physical law provided by asymptotic freedom, in 1973, qualifies as fundamental physics even if no fundamental laws were discovered per se). (2) There hasn't been a non-trivial (in the sense of being both not-easily-predicted by theory, like the top quark, and not trivially incorporated into existing theory, like neutrino masses) discovery in experimental physics since 1973-4, when the electroweak and strong theories were more or less confirmed. (It doesn't qualify as "easily predicted" since there were serious doubts beforehand.) There are possible exceptions to (2), depending on which experiments you consider to be most important for dark energy, dark matter, and cosmology/CMB. There haven't really been any decisive experiments---only a steady accumulation of evidence. I wouldn't consider any theory related to these three as confirmed. So yes, the field of fundamental physics is profoundly stagnant. (This is just the best historical understanding of a myself, a grad student, so I could be wrong or disagreed with by more prestigious physicists. Take it with a grain of salt.) |