It's like a corollary of Beveridge's law of headlines: if it's about a scientific discovery around the corner and mentions fusion.. it's a long way round the corner.
To elaborate on my agreement with you....
There's a fundamental tension between "news" and "incremental". Which means that in many many important areas of human enterprise (and progress), the "news" model is fundamentally counterproductive. So don't consume the news.
Instead, read a new textbook every year (or however often you can afford to).
But it generally seems like a good idea, similar to headlines ending with a question mark.
Byt yes, major science breakthroughs don't happen in a day or even a year, or 10.
Sometimes they happen in a day. But major engineering breakthroughs, now that's hard, because you have to build the thing.
Take flight as an example. People had been experimenting with it probably since the first human saw a bird and wanted to be able to do that. That went exactly nowhere until someone built a kite large enough to support the weight of a (light) human. And since then every few hundred years there was some kind of 'breakthrough', each of which building on probably hundreds or even thousands of failures in the intermediate. Until finally the Wright Brothers made their first powered flight and then we were off to the races. If not for all those failures and all of those baby steps the revolution wouldn't have happened when it did. The Wrights had a number of pre-requisite inventions at their disposal and as much as theirs was the true breakthrough without those other inventions they'd be sitting on a beach playing in the sand.
It's layer upon layer of failure, the occasional step of real and measurable progress and even rarer a real breakthrough.
AI was wandering in the wilderness just like fusion, a theory without results or practicality. But first alexnet in 2012, then transformers in 2017, and we are now at the stage where "AI is moving too fast and we must pause it!!!"
Who knows, maybe the alexnet of superconductors is lurking somewhere.
I disagree. The problem isn't the technology, but that for once we have something that demands more deliberate use. LLMs directly confront the literacy gap between the most and least educated members of the public, and I really do mean that in all senses of the word "literacy".
It will be quite a while before we get super conductors produced reliably.Of course the prerequisite is that a true super conductor is really created, in a lab condition, is going to take quite some time.
Yes he worked incrementally. He also invented ways to manufacture and create markets for his novel inventions.
We do have working super conductors produced at scale, some of which are just 'boring' alloys. The problem is that the cryogenics required for operation are expensive and complex, making them not very appealing for widespread use.
* (useful) Fusion
* Room Temperature Superconductors
* (useful) Quantum Computers
There's always breakthroughs but nothing seems to ever come out of it. Will they ever happen? Maybe. That said I've got a degree in theoretical physics and I'd bet against all three within my lifetime.
Eg there's no way to verify Hawking radiation in person (because well, good luck getting near a black hole to do so). But it's still supported by existing models of physics, thus it is science and not mere speculation.
Another recent example would be that the idea of time crystals was a theoretical physics result, backed by existing physics. That backing made it more than just speculation, leading to the investment of resources that eventually led to them actually being created.
Of course probably the most famous example of a theoretical physicst would be Einstein.
Lots of stuff typically goes through theoretical physicists before experimentalists determine how to test the idea. For example, all the particle accelerators, synchrotrons etc are initially designed by theoretical physicists via simulations etc to meet certain goals before putting in the billions of dollars it costs to actually translate those designs into something that can be built and used.
But even if you ignore that, or don't believe me, or whatever...
You're conflating two different meanings of "speculative" here, which I think is probably whence your confusion stems.
On the one hand, you're (reasonably) saying that theoretical physics is speculative, in the sense that, once you finish your modelling work, your output could be said to be a speculation about what would happen in an experiment.
On the other hand, you're (again, reasonably!) describing certain proposed engineering projects as speculative, in the sense that if someone says "we'll have economically viable fusion within N years", that's a speculation.
My point is that those are just very different types of speculation, they really don't have much to do with one another. It's perfectly reasonable to be someone who wants to use theoretical (a.k.a. model-based, a.k.a. speculative) techniques to try to advance human knowledge about the nature of reality, while also being someone who is skeptical about the practicality of various (speculative) proposed exploitations of that knowledge. "I'd like to advance physics in areas P and Q; I don't think engineering is likely to advance in areas X, Y, and Z".
For example, Einstein was a theoretical physicist (very much not an experimentalist). He wasn't (initially) particularly bullish on the plausibility of doing engineering based on his work (and when it became clear that atomic bombs were gonna happen, he was horrified). For a later famous example of theoretical physics, Peter Higgs (and others who did the same work) were not concerned with whether or not it would be possible to design an experiment to validation the existence of the Higgs Boson, while still being vaguely hopeful that someone might one day figure out that experiment (using equipment invented decades after the proposal of the Higgs mechanism).
ALSO, btw, just because someone is a theoretical physicist doesn't mean they don't think that they're uninterested in experimental validation. It means they're not working on experimental validation. Maybe someone else will figure out how to do experiments, maybe not, it's just not the theorist's problem.