[7thaccount]

I get your point about not being able to do everything in a vacuum, but I think there's also just a very limited set of geniuses that are of the Einstein/Newton level that might only exist once a century if you're lucky. We have millions in academia now and how many more physicists than the 1800s? There has certainly been progress, but it seems diminished.

There's a lot of discussion on this online and some folks speaking past each other. Yeah, there has been the invention of the internet, faster computers, the blue LED, sequencing the human genome...etc, but that is argued to mainly be engineering innovations on already understood physics. Where is the next discovery on the level of general relativity? Are we just at diminishing returns now where all the low hanging fruit has been found? How many physicists wasted away researching string theory? Were we just putting resources in the wrong place?

I do strongly think that modern research has become so beauracratic that it gets in the way of actual progress. The endless paperwork, presentations, teaching...etc isn't very conducive to discovery. Your average professor is more like a project manager than what Newton did.

[ijustlovemath]

The physics of the 1800s had a lot of low hanging fruit. Most undergrads in physics can show you a derivation of Maxwell's equations from first principles, and I think a fair few of them could have come up with it themselves if they were in Maxwell's shoes. The hard truth is that the physics/math of today is just much further afield, and much harder.

[varjag]

Very little of the stuff physicists came up with in the 19th century was obvious or low hanging at the time. And no your undergrads would likely have never came up with Maxwell's equations on their own.

[7thaccount]

Yeah, I agree with you on this one. It's kind of easy once you understand it, but it took Maxwell to figure it out. I might not have figured that out in ten centuries by myself lol.

[ijustlovemath]

I definitely think it takes a Maxwell to describe the physics behind displacement current (which I think was not around in Maxwell's initial drafts), but the derivations of the four classic Maxwell equations are fairly straightforward multivariable calculus problems that start with fairly simple assumptions. Multivariable calculus was relatively young in his era, but I think a motivated student from the current era could discover it given a summer of thought experimentation.

See for yourself: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AWI70HXrbG0

If you want some true genius, behold the shear terror of the near field of a dipole antenna. All shall view her and despair.

[ijustlovemath]

For those interested, see slide 4 of section 7: Hertzian dipoles

https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ece350/ece350lecture_n...

[pepinator]

That's a highly biased opinion. The Newtonian conception of physics is trivial for us, and we can say that most people could come up with the ideas by their own, but that's because our world conception is based on those ideas; it's already implicit in how we understand the world. That's why Newton was so important, there was a shift in the whole conceptualization of the physical world. With Maxwell's equations is similar. The interpretation as waves, the fact that the equations are Lorentz symmetric but no Newton symmetric, etc. All that is free for us, and it is not obvious at all.

[wholinator2]

Spend a trillion dollars building a bigger supercolider if you want more fundamentals. I think the application of these discoveries is much more important at this point. What do we actually use GR for? Corrections to gps, and ... it's not like it's gonna cure cancer. Technology will do that. We've exhausted all the fundamentals that we can access, that's what's happened. You want more fundamentals, you need more access. You want more access, Get ready to ride the exponential curve of costs

[7thaccount]

That is pretty contentious even in physics circles (from what I've heard in videos). The build me a bigger particle collider might not have any impact. We might not see any of the hypothetically proposed stuff.

[BLubliulu]

That doesn't change the general issue:

You need a certain amount of motivation, grid, etc. If these skills would be broadly available and the situation also, we would have a lot more Einsteins today.

There is plenty of things which do not require global projects building multibillion devices.

Mathematic thinking for ML for example.

DeepSeek paper for example.

[7thaccount]

I'm not so sure. It seems these kinds of people are exceedingly rare that grasp a fundamental truth we've all missed. ChatGPT is really cool, but building a really really big neural network and training it off all the stuff on the internet certainly seems less impressive than discovering calculus. I mean ..LLMs are impressive and magical of course.