alt Hacker News> I have a physics degree and I regularly read the latest published research. Please don't make ad hominem attacks.
It was not an attack, I just don't know the authority from which your comments derive (and there wasn't really evidence provided outside your opinion which I think others disagree with).
> The point is that we made giant strides every few years for decades, and then... nothing. The field has hardly advanced since the 1970s!
I think my subtle argument is that we've been writing for about 4,000 years, so something discovered in the last 50 years is relatively new.
Even limiting yourself to the current era of post-Enlightenment inquiry, 50 years is still relatively new.
Separately, if you truly accept that physics is completely knowable, then it would stand to reason that as we asymptotically approach knowing 'everything', the marginal rate of acquiring new knowledge would slow.
So I guess I don't see which way you are leaning - are we not learning things because we know everything, or are we being impatient and not recognizing how fast our progress has been?
> I think my subtle argument is that we've been writing for about 4,000 years, so something discovered in the last 50 years is relatively new.
Sure, but look at everything else: there's this beautifully smooth exponential curve that everybody is riding up into the stratosphere, but theoretical physicists seem to be staring up at the foundations from below.
To be fair, these are the hardest of hard problems: figuring out the substrate from the inside.
The only point I'm trying to make is that we've pushed things to the very edge of human cognitive capability. The mathematicians have figured out how to push past that with tooling. The physicists just need to find their own way to expand the boundaries with the new toys available.