Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?

Some of the problems have to do with science itself and not the social systems.

Progress in fundamental physics is stuck because of the difficulty doing experiments. CERN is thinking about building an even bigger accelerator that might be done by 2070. It is very possible that it discovers no new phenomena but instead puts a few more digits of accuracy on certain parameters of the standard model at great cost. I think experiments like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-Kamiokande

are the most interesting area because there really is deep mystery in the neutrino sector and it is important to push the bounds on proton decay. However it is still a story of building bigger and bigger machines and not getting a definitive result like

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

> They measure disruption by examining citation patterns.

What a horrible metric. I think the choice of reinventing h-index for disruption is straight out of desperation on putting numbers or something. A disruption should cause a shift in thinking or process between established methods and the novel ones.

For example, discovery of next gen sequencing of DNA leads to the downfall of the older sanger process which was more laborious and time consuming.

Without these corresponding reduction of established techniques, these new science does not 'disrupt' anything