Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

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From the WSJ article:

> The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.

I don't agree with the second part of the sentence, i.e. about the reason, not that I disagree, just that I have no idea why that is. But the first part, about discovering little of importance, is true though.

Just look back at what theoretical physist has yielded in term of practical implications historically. XVIII century physics gave us gravitation, thermo-dynamics, and basically enabled the industrial revolution. XIX century physics gave us electricity, electro-magnetism, computers, etc. First half of the XX century gave us nuclear energy, lasers, etc. But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.

Not sure the eras comparable. One _could_ argue that the earlier discoveries were lower hanging fruit, where it was possible for a single brilliant soul to come up with a new concept. Now it seems to require more and more collaboration.

That said, since the 60s much of the physics landscape has changed. Postulation and discovery of dark energy and evidence of dark matter, of the Higgs boson and the tau neutrino, the incredible LIGO and JWST projects, discovery of graphene, quantum computation in its entirety, topological insulators, memristors, and the entire array of body imaging techniques (MRI, CT) ...

It isn't hard to argue that most of the advances that people recognize as scientific advances are more from material sciences than they have ever been theoretical physics, though?

Even claiming that theoretical physics enabled the industrial revolution feels off to me. What supports that claim?

Well it is hard to talk about theoretical physics at the XVIII century since physics in general was nascent and there was little separation between the disciplines. But I believe the industrial revolution was largely driven by the development of the steam engine, so Watt, Carnot, later Kalvin, etc.

Of course that's not the only factor. Like computers rely on XIX century physics but it took almost a century before the technology became industrially significant.

> But is there any major technology that post 1960s theoretical physics has given us? I can't think of any example.

Insane take. Just GPS, MRIs (high temp. supercondutors), electron microscopes, quantum computing, and chip fabs alone are relevant to us here at HN.

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