[Invictus0]

Everyone here is missing the point. It's not that physics is running out of questions to ask. It's that the questions are getting increasingly more expensive to answer, and the answers are increasingly less compelling. The low-hanging fruit picked long ago, modern physics produces fewer discoveries that change people's lives in the way that radar, lasers, microwaves, and transistors did, which makes science investment less compelling to the public.

[kragen]

There's always a time gap.

Remember that from the first public microwave demonstrations in 01895 by Bose to the first deployments (as radar in the 01940s) took 45 years; the Amana Radarange brought microwaves into people's homes in 01967, another 27 years later; and microwave ovens didn't really go mainstream until about 01990, another 23 years after that, 95 years after Bose's first public demonstrations. The LASER was first built in 01960 (following numerous physics advances starting in 01917) but the first mass-market laser product was the CD player, introduced in 01982 and surpassing vinyl records in sales for the first time in 01988, 28 years after Maiman's first LASER.

If anything, the time gap seems to be shortening, but the place to look for "discoveries that change people's lives" is not in basic physics research of today but basic and applied physics of a few decades ago turning into common practice more recently. And in that case there are a lot of examples, especially if we go further afield from just physics discoveries:

- modern LED lighting comes from the physics discovery of how to make stable blue LEDs (though, for reasons of market failure, most LED lights still last only 3000 hours instead of 30,000);

- modern cellphones, computers, GPS, broadband, and in particular broadband wi-fi come from numerous physics discoveries that have enabled chip feature sizes to continue reducing over the last 20 years;

- optoelectronics advances are largely a question of physics, and without even counting blue LEDs, better optoelectronics have over the last 20 years dramatically improved TV screens, computer monitors, cellphone screens, fiber-optic communication, Blu-Ray data storage, and LIDAR for, e.g., self-driving cars;

- the mRNA vaccine for covid, while a biological discovery rather than a physics discovery, was designed within a few day after the genome was published, and seems to have both higher efficacy and less side effects than previous kinds of vaccines (though unfortunately for political reasons it wasn't rolled out for another 9 months, during which tens of millions of people died);

- lithium-ion batteries have gone mainstream, enabling a transition to electric cars and wireless power tools;

- better power electronics, resulting from solid-state physics research, have made induction stoves widespread;

- modern solar panels cost a tenth of what they did a decade ago, in significant part due to physics discoveries over the past 20 years, now account for the majority of new power generation capacity being built, and will probably dramatically drop the cost of energy by 02030;

- due to chemistry discoveries, Spectra/Dyneema fishing line is cheap, strong enough to make bulletproof vests, in fact as strong as the strongest steel, and floats on water;

- superhydrophobic coatings, a physics discovery, are going mainstream now.

Radar, microwaves, transistors, and nuclear physics (which you strangely forgot to mention, even though it's fundamental to modern oncology, and produces a significant part of the electrical power in many countries) resulted from WWII. We've had an atypically low level of great-power wars over the last 75 years, which has been great, but it wouldn't be surprising to have another great-power war in the next decade. If that happens, maybe the survivors will be reduced to sticks and stones, but if not, you can bet that they will have spent a lot on physics research.

[labcomputer]

Yes, but those new discoveries are less fundamental.

One of the reasons we had such an explosion of new theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century (which gave birth to all the practical discoveries you mentioned) is that, in 1900, there was just so much unexplained weird shit.

Shit like:

1. How do you predict the energy of electrons produced by shining light on a surface? And why does light cause electrons to be produced?

2. Why is the speed of light the same in every direction, to really, really high precision?

3. Why are there spectral bands in the light from stars? And why are they sometimes shifted?

4. Why can current pass only one way through a metal pin poking a semi-insulator?

5. Why does pollen appear to move randomly in the sunlight in still air?

6. Why the fuck is the sky blue? Why does light sometimes act like a way, but sometimes like a particle?

Remember, a lot of this weird shit went unexplained for 25-50-100 years. Then, between 1900 and 1950, smart people came up with theories that explained all the weird shit. So we don't really have so much weird shit anymore because most of it has been explained. Sure, super-conductors are kinda weird, but we also seem to be able to predict a lot of their properties from existing theory.

So, we're really just riding the coat-tails of scientists from 100 years ago. People 100 years from now aren't going to have coat tails to ride.

[kragen]

Less fundamental than transistors? How much less fundamental can you get? There were no transistors floating around in the asteroid belt. Unlike, say, fission reactors, no natural transistor has ever been found.

There's a lot of unexplained weird shit today, too, including the arrow of time, turbulence, dark matter, dark energy, "tuning" of physical constants, solar flares, extreme-energy cosmic rays, ball lightning, the unresolved inconsistency between quantum mechanics and special relativity, structures up to the edge of greatness like the Sloan Wall, the bizarrely low-entropy state the universe began in, and consciousness. Short gamma-ray bursts were finally explained in 02017 thanks to LIGO. (The explanation had been hypothesized previously, but Lucretius correctly hypothesized the explanation for Brownian motion, too, 2080 years ago.) You may be interested in my longer overview in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119.

Your list of 6 weird turds unexplained in 01900 is mostly correct, except that #6 was correctly explained by Rayleigh in terms of Maxwellian electrodynamics in 01881, and Fizeau correctly explained the redshift of stellar spectra in terms of the Doppler effect in 01848, though of course not the spectra themselves. We could add, "Why is the Andromeda Nebula's spectrum so smeared out?" (leading to the Shapley-Curtis Great Debate in 01920), "How can the Earth be older than the Sun?", and "What powers Becquerel's uranium rays?"

The quote from Kelvin in this thread turns out to be incorrect (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Thomson#Misattributed https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/physics/lord-kelvin-...) but Albert Michelson did make just such a claim in 01894:

While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance — where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.

The curious thing is that Michelson in 01894 already knew about at least four of your five weird pieces of shit (the Schottky diode had been discovered but was not yet well known), as well as numerous others. In fact, he was personally responsible for discovering #2 in 01887.

So how could even Michelson make such a grievous error, the same error you're making now?

Well, I guess he underestimated the importance of the pieces of shit that were unexplained.

However, I think that error is less understandable today, though, since among the things we know we know virtually nothing about are the nature of 95% of the mass in the universe and the bulk dynamics of plasma, the state of matter in which we see 99% of the remaining 5%.

There's still the question of whose coattails we'll be riding in 100 years, assuming we somehow manage to survive. The Nobel Prize is imperfect and backward-looking by nature, but it suggests Ghez and Gensel for discovering Sagittarius A*, Penrose for black hole robustness, Mayor and Queloz for discovering exoplanets, Peebles for physical cosmology stuff including dark matter, Mourou and Strickland for petawatt lasers by chirped pulse amplification, Ashkin for optical tweezers, Barish and Thorne and Weiss for LIGO, Thouless and Haldane and Kosterlitz for topological order in matter, Kajita and McDonald for neutrino oscillations, Nakamarua and Amano and Akasaki for blue LEDs, and Higgs and Englert for explaining why things have mass. Those coattails doesn't seem obviously worse than the list from the corresponding years 100 years earlier: Guillaume for invar, Stark for spectral line splitting, Planck for quantum physics, Barkla for X-ray spectroscopy, the Braggs and Laue for X-ray diffraction, and Onnes for liquid helium.

But you don't yet know, for example, the significance of optical tweezers for submicron 3-D fabrication, of dark matter for interstellar propulsion, or of topological phase transitions for sustaining life in the Degenerate Era. (Of course I don't know them either; I'm not a time traveler.) NOVA hasn't even made an episode about topological order yet, so you don't yet understand that today's physics advances are fully as important as those of a century ago.

Consider the innovations evident in The Atlantic in November 01921: https://archive.org/details/walpolebeauty00beck. The Victrola (Edison, 01877), tires with anti-skid treads (Dunlop and Continental, 01904), chemical weapons (book review of "The Next War", p. 10; in theory Playfair's cacodyl cyanide, 01854, but more realistically the Hague Convention in 01899, and then massively in 01914), air war, pewter, eugenics, silk lampshades, the electric chair, aeronautics (not yet understood theoretically, so we have to credit the Wrights, 01903), Haldane's metaphysical speculations about "relativity", automobiles (arguably the Oshkosh steam car in 01878, the Flocken Electrowagen in 01888, or the second Marcus car in 01875), motion pictures (Muybridge, 01878, or Anschütz, 01894, or Le Prince, 01886, or Dickson and Edison, 01891-4), thermostats from the Minneapolis Heat Regulator Co. (Drebbel, 01620), clamp-on electric lamps (based on Edison's 1880s designs), personalized pencils with erasers (Lipman, 01858), Smith-Corona portable typewriters ("seniors' theses MUST be typewritten") (Rose, 01906), prenatal clinics, the welfare state ("if we can tax so heavily for purposes of war without raising a protest...", "The taking over by towns and states...of the responsibility for the care and prevention of tuberculosis...meant..."), kindergarten, workmen's comp ("greatly increased demand for safety appliances"), Prohibition, the traction plough, the Panama Canal, "The terrible world-upheaval through which we have just passed...the great war", the resulting inflation of the pound, passports, the SS Imperator, the Bolshevik revolution, the "roar of the city", buses, the League of Nations, and so on.

The crucial thing about this litany is that not one of this astounding list of innovations owes anything to Guillaume, Stark, Planck, Barkla, the Braggs, Laue, or Onnes. Then, even more than now, applied science rode on the coat-tails of basic science from generations before.

[mkl]

> vaccine ... wasn't rolled out for another 9 months, during which tens of millions of people died

The total death toll has just passed 5 million.

[ericmay]

Official one yes. Idk about tens of millions but I’m also thinking 5 million is lower than the true numbers. Though I’m also not sure there is a qualitative difference (as much as it pains me to say).

[kragen]

Those are confirmed, diagnosed deaths. Presumably many people died without ever being diagnosed in places like Andhra Pradesh and Congo.