alt Hacker NewsI have a pet conspiracy theory for why there has been so little progress in physics for so long. The invention of the nuclear bomb scared a lot of people, it made them scared of physics. What else might physicists turn up that could change the world in dramatic ways? Anti-gravity? Ray guns? Other dimensions? Travel to other worlds? All bad for business, no one is going to buy your airplanes or air craft carriers if they can buy an anti-gravity machine. So physics was suppressed by both business and government. Physicists were given "safe" work to do (ITER, quants) that would occupy them and keep them from exploring wild stuff. Grant financing was controlled so that only safe research would be conducted. It would be fairly invisible to the world, just a few high level decisions would determine how the funding was directed. I get the impression that if this was indeed a conscious decision that it's starting to fall apart as younger generations take over and become frustrated with the direction of physics. They weren't there when the A-bomb was invented, and nuclear weapons have not been on peoples minds much for a long time, most people have not lived in a time when one was used. So they see interesting topics and want to explore them and encounter resistance from more established scientists. It's a conspiracy theory because it would involve some buy-in from a fair number of physicists to make it work, but a lot of physicists when I was getting my BA in physics were very loudly saying "never again" about atomic weapons and felt it had tarnished the whole profession. It's very difficult to say what humanity would be capable of handling in terms of radical new inventions. Anti-gravity could solve many large problems, but it might make it even easier to destroy Earth. Once new knowledge exists it is hard to suppress it. Stopping it from from ever existing seems easier. I guess we'll find out if physics has been suppressed if the dam breaks and new ideas start proliferating. The nature of the new physics would be a big clue as to whether research in it was suppressed. I'm reminded of Elon Musk, he seems to have had really radical success in some very stagnant industries, just by trying instead of accepting limits, and being able to fund his ideas himself.
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There are some good comments here, thanks! There has been an international component to physics research cooperation. It seems not inconceivable that physicists in many countries, meeting at paper conventions and such might have agreed and recruited each other to try to prevent the next atomic bomb type invention. So while competition between countries is certainly real, competition between scientists might be somewhat different. You'd think there would be some people who would pursue it regardless, but they'd probably have to work with a team, and not everyone on the team may have supported the goals. It's just a theory, but it has some plausibility. Perhaps there are people everywhere who have decided not to be part of endeavors that could be disruptive and they've done us all a favor or have kept us from discovering the secrets of the universe. Who knows? The ethics of science has been mostly left to chance and individual decisions.
An easier theory is that the Standard Model is so good that it's very difficult to find anywhere it fails. So there's no experimental fuel to propel physics forward.
What time frame are you talking about here? Starting in 01950, 01995, 02010?
If we're talking about 01995, it's conceivable that, say, the US and CERN could coordinate to suppress research into hafnium bombs, AVLIS, antigravity, or whatever. If we're talking about research much prior to that point, though, you'd have to include the Russians in the conspiracy. Probably not just any Russians, either; probably Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Tsar-Bomba-era Sakharov, and his successors. And, on the other side, people like J. Edgar Hoover, JFK, McNamara, Kissinger, Johnny von Neumann, and Teller.
I don't want to say it's literally impossible for Brezhnev or his underlings to have made a secret agreement with Kissinger and Teller to suppress the development of theoretical physics in order to keep the world predictable. But I do think it's pretty implausible, and there would have been an enormous incentive to cheat on any such secret agreement.
In the 01990s, though, it could have become plausible. But, remember that that's also when Pakistan became a nuclear weapons state, shortly followed by North Korea in 02006. And the People's Republic of China has had nuclear weapons since 01964, so they evidently had significant physics capabilities that they were willing to use for warfare (which was a huge priority; Mao reorganized the country's economy to resist an anticipated US invasion), and they dominated the TOP500 supercomputer list until this year, when they withdrew from it in apparent protest against the efforts of the USA to reverse their technological progress with a worldwide system of export controls.
So I think there's maybe a ten-year window when this could have happened somewhat, about 01992 to 02002. Both before and after that, there are too many countries with strong physics communities that are too bitterly opposed to make such cooperation plausible.
The theory stops working imho if you take competition into account. The world is not aligned as a single bloc of power. While it’s not completely unthinkable (but extremely unlikely, imho) that some scientists plus some decision makers from, say, the liberal west might collude to achieve this kind of suppression, their counterparts from one or multiple other blocs might not, because they want to dominate and anti-gravity guns surely give you some nice advantage.