It's not just physics. Imagine you had told Gene Cernan, when he returned from the Moon in 1972, that no humans would leave Earth's orbit for the next 50 years.

I'm sure he would have concluded that there must have been a global nuclear war that obliterated civilization.

The same can be said for biology, where the discoveries of the past half-century pale in comparison to, say, the discovery of DNA, or the Miller–Urey experiment.

When you ask scientists for what the greatest scientific results of the past 20 years are, they tend to name the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, and CRISPR.

When I hear this, I always think "so, a small part of the Standard Model, a phenomenon that was predicted in the 19th century, and an effective tool for editing genes – that's it?!?"