alt Hacker News> To date, string theory has yet to produce a single prediction that was verified by experiment.
What a funny example to pick. See, "string theory" gets a lot of attention in the media, and nowhere else
In actual physics, string theory is a niche of a niche of a niche. It is not a common topic of papers or conferences and does not receive almost anything in funding. What little effort it gets it gets because paper and pencils for some theoretical physics is vastly cheaper than a particle accelerator or space observatory.
Physicists don't really use or do anything with string theory.
This is a great example of what is a serious problem in science.
The public reads pop-sci and thinks they have a good understanding of science. But they verifiably do not. The journalists and writers who create this content are not scientists, do not understand science, and do not have a good view into what is "meaningful" or "big" in science.
Remember cold fusion? It was never considered valid in the field of physics because they did a terrible excuse for "science", went on a stupid press tour, and at no point even attempted to disambiguate the supposed results they claimed. The media however told you this was something huge, something that would change the world.
It never even happened.
Science IS about small advances. Despite all the utter BS pushed by every "Lab builds revolutionary new battery" article, Lithium ion batteries HAVE doubled in capacity over a decade or two. It wasn't a paradigm shift, or some genius coming out of the woodwork, it was boring, dedicated effort from tens of thousands of average scientists, dutifully trying out hundreds and hundreds of processes to map out the problem space for someone else to make a good decision with.
Science isn't "Eureka". Science is "oh, hmm, that's odd...." on reams of data that you weren't expecting to be meaningful.
Science is not "I am a genius so I figured out how inheritance works", science is "I am an average guy and laboriously applied a standardized method to a lot of plants and documented the findings".
Currently it is Nobel Prize week. Consider how many of the hundreds of winners whose name you've never even heard of.
Consider how many scientific papers were published just today. How many of them have you read?
You cherrypicked one of my three examples to argue against. Then in order to argue against it, had to pretend that I said something that I did not.
My claim was that there were a few thousand string theorists. In fact I've seen estimates of 1-4 thousand physicists working in the field. Your claim is that this is a small niche. Given that there are something like a quarter million physicists, that is also true.
I wasn't picking on string theory because it is central to physics. I'm picking on it as a highly visible example. What is its actual importance? String theory's lack of experimental evidence means that it isn't that important to the broader field. And if its half-century of failure continues, it will eventually be just a footnote in history. So it stands as a good example of normal research being a waste of time, rather than meaningfully contributing to the progress of knowledge.
That said, your example of technology improving is a good one. As the book The Innovator's Dilemma points out, technology often improves on an exponential curve. With Moore's law just being the best-known example. And this technology improvement does take a lot of research effort.
But this kind of technological research mostly isn't basic science. In fact a lot of it takes place in secret, inside of companies. Rather than being published in Nature, it winds up as intellectual property. Hidden behind patents and trade secrets of various kinds. But even though most if it isn't basic science, it does drive a lot of basic science as well.
The question is what kind of science do most scientists do. My anecdotal experience is that most scientists work in relatively small cliques, focused on problems and paradigms that are local to their field. And when new ideas come along, most of that work is obsoleted. This anecdotal picture fits very well with the article that I pointed at about science progressing one funeral at a time.
But if you work in something more technology adjacent, I can see that your experience might be very different.
My impression remains what it was. But I admit to not having good data on which kind of experience is more common.