| You're confusing invention, innovation, and fundamental research. An iPhone and an original IBM PC are essentially the same class of device. The iPhone is miniaturised, refined, and improved, but the principles of operation are recognisably similar. They both have similar technological roots. You can have steady technological process without a revolution in the fundamentals - which was what Kuhn was interested in. Fundamental research tends to become math before it becomes technology. Maxwell and Heaviside are more fundamental than the transistor amplifier, the dynamic memory cell, or the valve radio, and you don't get to have any of the latter without the former. After an explosion of change in the late 19th and early 20th century, the pace of that kind of fundamental research has slowed right down. Existing models and techniques are being refined to create smaller and faster devices, but there have been no revolutions that could lead to new kinds of devices. There are some prospects for invention - like quantum computing - but there doesn't seem to be any immediate likelihood of new insights on the scale of the revolutions created by electromagnetic theory, thermodynamics, evolution, the periodic table, relativity, quantum theory, and the standard model. |
Familiar principles like Ohm's law stop working on small scale devices. Fundamental research in nanoscience was required to learn how things behave on such small scales. Some of that research led to Nobel Prizes and new kinds of devices like MEMS.
But we do seem to have reached a limit in physics; not the end, but the limit of what we can learn with the resources available to us. The revolutions we can look forward to in the near future (e.g better machine learning, implantation of 3D printed organs, safe and effective gene therapy, quantum computers with more qubits) are mostly about new ways of building up rather than learning down. Opportunities for engineers, not scientists.
But then again, a scientific revolution might strike without warning.