[sdenton4]

I was careful to say fundamental physics - there's great stuff happening in materials science.

We are in a world where exponentially growing amounts of energy are needed to confirm/deny an increasingly small slice of the standard model. We still don't know what dark matter or energy is (almost literal holes in theory), we haven't figured out how to scale up quantum computers, and we don't have scalable fusion reactors. The cost of progress is growing and the rewards are diminishing; I call that an impasse.

(Arguably we could call the ongoing advances in materials science cases of applied quantum mechanics, with some blurry line with fundamental physics.)

You are right that I'm not a physicist - I'm trained as a mathematician, and these days work in the intersection of machine learning, acoustics, and ecology. Having looked around a lot with impact-colored glasses, I don't see the argument for fundamental physics, but am happy to be wrong.

[blueprint]

none of the things you listed have anything to do with fundamental or theoretical physics. It also seems that you don't know about some of the recent advances. we don't need to deny the standard model. Nature has already shown us proof that it's not sufficient. but the standard model is not actually fundamental physics. It's basically just a mash up of a bunch of aspects of particle systems. There's, again, a ton of work on alternatives. and I would have to disagree, it would seem that we do know how to scale, quantum computers, but we're still doing the material science for it. Physics is probably far more advanced than almost anyone really realizes... and that is the bigger issue. We are still working out what advances to pay attention to. Yet what we do know about , if the engineering work were done, is enough to get us "free" energy, for example.