[growwrkr6]

When was it easy? So much early discovery has been binned or replaced; easy answers were wrong. It took hundreds of years of effort to bubble up relativity and information theory.

When was this golden age in the past when the world was magically easier and “better”? I see complaints about social media brainwashing people but what is religion and nation state populism?

I have a hard time taking contemporary opinions on “life is getting harder” seriously or sincerely. It’s just another clickbait trope.

[concordDance]

Life is getting harder in some fairly concrete and objective ways. Most noticably the number of hours the average person needs to work to be able to buy a house has gone up a lot.

[growwrkr6]

That’s a political problem not a scientific problem.

No one wants to tax rich people who are of the age to have benefited from an era of high taxes. We let them pull the ladder up behind them.

There is no real reason to follow their orders or coddle their sensibilities. What are they going to do? Instigate a civil war from their Lay Z Boy? 60-70% of the population want to reverse their political policies across the spectrum of contexts. Just do it.

[xkcd1963]

we gotta just build more housing

[tcmart14]

I do think it is getting harder, but that is not necessarily bad at all. One big bottleneck in science is the technology to do experiments. A lot of the discoveries that required lower tech are for the most part over, now we need some serious technology to make discoveries. Hubble has its limits, so we need the James Webb Telescope. Einstein predicted gravitational waves, but it took almost 100 years to develop the technology of LIGO and get it up and running to run the experiments. Also, the technology needed is also insanely more expensive. Newton needed time, pen, paper to writes hit laws of motion. Now we need satellites out at the L2 point that can be put in place remotely since it may be awhile before people can swing by and make repairs or troubleshoot physically.

Maybe just spit balling. Maybe it isn't that science has gotten harder, but science needs more engineering support than what it currently has to develop the technologies to allow more a more rapid discovery.

[paulpauper]

QM, SR, and GR literally didn't exist 120 years ago...think about that.

Also any physics paper you read today is about one of those major discoveries made over past 120 years, except maybe extromagantism or optics

[xwdv]

It was definitely easier in the past. I look at a lot of past scientific discoveries and I think I could have easily come up with them if I was in the time period and was educated. Could have made light bulbs, automobiles, telephones, computing machines, etc.