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As a total layman in the physics world, it appears (looking from the benches) that things are crawling at the same speed they did 20 years ago.
Is that true ? Is the speed of physics advances accelerating as well ? What has been happening that we might of been missing ?
EDIT: Especially in the applied & practical worlds
Maybe you mean more theoretical physics? I don't really have enough knowledge to be useful there.
The 30-40 years have seen tech advancements roughly in line with Moore's law, which is fantastic. But that's the result of engineering advancements. There's no precedent I'm aware of to expect the same results out of the hard sciences.
The delay between a discovery in physics and a Nobel prize is getting bigger and bigger [1]. It's true for all fields, but the effect is particularly strong for physics.
'''It is safe to say that late 1920s and early 1930s were the “Golden Age” of 20th century physics, when the progress was lightning-fast and new discoveries lay like low-hanging fruits. In the 1940s Dirac commented bitterly, in view of problems quantum field theory was having at the time: “Then, a second-rate physicist could do first-rate work – now, it takes a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work”. Every physicist would love to live in such “interesting times”, when a new unexplored scientific territory opens up.''' [2]
So, its started decreasing quite some time. Also, as there are more an more people involved, the brainmass gets diluted. As of now there is no chance to get a photo of a concentration of luminaries as from the famous Solvay conferences [3].
So, if you (like me) read Feynman lectures of physics and know physics from 1920s-1950s, you are likely to get disappointed by the current pace.
...and just compare to recent progress in machine learning, when we can play on our computers with things, which a few years ago were thought to be out of our reach.
(But it shouldn't be surprising, technologies and science do have their growth time, and usually it's finite time.)
[1] http://priceonomics.com/why-nobel-winning-scientists-are-get...
[2] https://woodtickquarterly.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/graham-fa... (BTW: I recommend this book a lot)
Largely hardware advances that are heavily interrelated with physics. Even still, it has been incremental (though still impressive) production advances and not radical architectural redesign. Intel only got bounds checking in hardware (MPX extensions) a couple of years ago, even though this was first done over half a century ago.
Software hasn't.
"New physics", physics that we don't already have an explanation for, is becoming increasingly rare. Our definition of "new physics" is also expanding to including things that aren't fundamentally new, just small holes in our understanding of the equations.
The flip side of this is that while we already know the broad strokes, there is still a lot of work to be done in filling in the details. This work is just less glamorous and doesn't make the headlines.
I'm not sure there's been any acceleration of discovery in the hard sciences. The 30-40 years have seen tech advancements roughly in line with Moore's law, which is fantastic. But that's the result of engineering advancements. There's no precedent I'm aware of to expect the same results out of the hard sciences.
The trouble in Physics is that the new tools look like the LHC.
If you believe Lee Smolin then advocates of String Theory have also had an oppressive effect on opposing ideas, making it hard to get tenure if you're not working on it, effectively choking off competing theories (e.g. Doubly Special Relativity, Loop Quantum Gravity, etc)
I have no data or first-hand evidence, as I was only a mere Physics undergrad, but found his arguments pursuasive. String Theory (and his oscillating pals) have certainly been dominant in the scientific press, and don't seem to have come up with much. Could be a false negative though. We'll only know when someone opens the next big door.