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> So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications?

Particle physics winter, just like AI in the 80s [1]. (It's a weird coincidence/irony that this is happening just as AI is ascendent and delivering significant military applications.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

This is exactly right, and it's not just particle physics. Space exploration has the same dynamic. We went to the moon not because we thought it was scientifically interesting but because we were afraid the Russians would get there first. It's no coincidence that we haven't been back in 40 years. NASA now exists primarily as a mechanism for funneling pork into key congressional districts. Any science that it does is secondary.

With US-China tensions on the rise, China's space program steadily progressing, and profits from asteroid mining on the horizon (with the associated national interests to secure and protect profits), space exploration is bound to profit again from this dynamic. It is indeed no coincidence that all the major space programs got interesting again all at the same time.

Another goal of particle and nuclear physics funding from the 60's through 90's was to produce a steady stream of highly qualified people to work at the defense labs (Los Alamos, Livermore, Lincoln Labs, etc). My colleagues would get prestigious fellowships to do research at these places, and eventually get sucked into the classified research area. Unfortunately, I don't think the best and brightest U.S. students are going into physics these days, so this rationale for research investment is no longer there.

> I don't think the best and brightest U.S. students are going into physics these days

Where do you think they are going to?

Ad tech

physics PhD, then wall street HFT.

So still physics

Neuroscience is a big one. I would posit that understanding the brain is the biggest scientific frontier of my generation.

In the USA, a lot of funding for R & D (e.g. engineering and science) comes from grants that are military grants (e.g. Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.). In the US, about half (54%) of federal funding (coming from the public Federal budget) is via "military" and the rest is from other federal agencies ("civilian").

Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-us...

Is that an American thing?

Note: The above figures don't take classified funding into account. Because it's secret. Most of the classified funding is military, so the proportion of military funding is actually higher.

Yes, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a European country where half the national research budget comes through military research.

> The U.S.'s greatest military victory--the last time we can cleanly call ourselves heroes--was World War II. The Nazis were an awful regime who did horrific things that no one can defend. And Japan directly attacked us. We had good reasons for fighting and we (with our allies) conclusively won.

> And there is broad public sentiment that we won because of physics. High-end theoretical physics gave us futuristic tools like radio, radar, and of course the nuclear bomb. Lower-end physics gave us the tools for engineering the incredible machines we fought with, like airplanes, bombs, tanks, and ships.

> So, in minds of U.S. citizens, and more importantly in the halls of U.S. government, discussions of high-end physics come with an implicit promise of military applications. Maybe we could figure out anti-gravity, people think, or ray guns, or teleportation, or force fields--if we only understood the particles and fields a bit better.

What is your opinion on the counter-thesis that the reason rather was the Sputnik crisis?

Yes, money determines the direction of modern science. (This isn't 1900 any more!) And a huge chunk of the funding money (in America anyway) comes from the military. You're right on: if it (whatever it is) looks like it might have a military application, then it's much more likely to get military funding, which for some researchers, means it's more likely to get funding period.

One small quibble, physics only shortened the war in the Pacific, getting the Japanese to agree to an unconditional surrender without an invasion of the Japanese homeland and the concomitant estimated one million American casualties. The undamaged industrial might and natural resources available to the United States to continually contribute war fighting material to the frontlines help win the war in Europe and the Pacific theater more than anything else. The Pacific front was not the priority of the European front, we had a Germany first war plan even before the war started, the heavy dependence of Japan on imported natural resources made their defeat inevitable if America had the will to fight, especially after the first strike on Pearl Harbor did not work in the way the Japanese envisioned. It left America's carriers and most of the submarine fleet intact and did not crush America's morale.

Sources needed

Why the allies won would be a good start

this is actually known in most of the world; that the US just cleanly won with raw superiority purely driven by what is good and right and no complex motives (including omitting the use of nukes to avoid having to do a proper invasion with their related losses and that they didn't want to join the party in europe, then were late to the party after things were already decided and THEN went home claiming they defeated the Nazis) is just the US-internal narrative. The other countries sadly didn't simply forget the political discussions that happened during the war period.

Read a lot of military history books when I was a child. Now I can google some things for a refresher - you can trust them or not, mostly wikipedia.

There are many citations in the article about the US/UK strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_first

The US oil embargo on the Japanese homeland had put them on their back foot before the war even started - and is often cited as a reason for the undelivered Japanese declaration of war prior to Pearl Harbor, and once we starting island hopping/pushing them off the Asian mainland they could only delay defeat and to make it as painful as possible for America to progress to discourage an invasion of Japan. Part of Germany's impetus for attacking on the Eastern front was the need for more fuel, the Allies had more in their homelands of the USA and the Soviet Union than was available to Germany.

The somewhat disputed Yamamoto quote says it best(the movie version probably is what sticks in people's minds): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_attack_on_...

The Soviets suffered more casualties than anybody to stop the Germans on the Eastern front and tying them up there helped reduce the German troops available for their Middle East push and beach/support defenses in France and Italy and the Soviets were able to build much of their own military hardware even after the German invasion but they still got our help, mainly for transport of material. We helped almost all the Allies, but most support went to the UK and Soviet Union. Kruschev quotes Stalin here: "He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany's pressure, and we would have lost the war." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

Thank you for the well thought out response. I've read a handful of books on the atomic bomb so this interests me. Have a upvote for your time.

Ah thanks, a comment that makes sense to me (and doesn't require too much insight into the esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness' :-P ). Agree, a break-through like the harnessing of nuclear energy was doesn't seem to be on the horizon (but who knows what we don't know?). And it might affect the perceived utility of physics by the military.

But i'm wondering if there isn't a more menacing threat looming for these advanced sciences. We could actually be hitting a hard wall in our understanding of nature. We are using instruments created for us in our dimension to probe worlds that might be much too small (or large) for us to make any serious sense of, at least for the next millennium (maybe). Maybe it's time we accept that we can't understand everything, only a little more at the time, maybe (probably) in infinity.

Meanwhile, there are a vast number of insights pertinent to the human scale waiting to be found.

At the end of the 19th century [...] it was generally accepted that all the important laws of physics had been discovered and that, henceforth, research would be concerned with clearing up minor problems and particularly with improvements of method and measurement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_physics

> esoteric particle physics terms like 'Naturalness'

It just means "numbers involved in physics are short and simple". From wikipedia:

> In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory should take values "of order 1" and that free parameters are not fine-tuned. That is, a natural theory would have parameter ratios with values like 2.34 rather than 234000 or 0.000234.

And the reason physicists tend to expect their theories to be natural is that in the history of physics uncovering new things, most things have been natural, to the point where significant amounts of knowledge has been derived based on the expectation of naturalness -- that is, when something could be natural or not, and we couldn't properly test it yet, we just assumed it was natural and went on to research other things. And then, possibly decades later, when it's finally possible to test the theory, the test just confirms that yes, it was natural.

>then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war.

There is good reason to believe that biochem would only have hurt western interests if it was researched. Countries with nukes don't need weapons like this to wage war.