I don't think paradigm shifts have to be 'better' in some march-toward-progress sense, they can be lateral or even regressive in that way and still lead to longer-horizon improvements.

I think also what's practically applicable changes constantly. Perhaps we're truly at the End of Science, but empirically we've been wrong every other time we've said that. My money is that there's more race to run.

> relativity was only recently fully backed up with experimental data.

Gravitational deflection (General relativity) received pretty important confirmation in 1919, only 8 years after Einstein first proposed it.

Time dilation (Special realativity) was experimentally confirmed in 1932.

Physics is a bit of a special case. This certainly doesn't apply to, say, biology, medicine, cognition, not to mention any of the social sciences—i.e. most research.

I'm also a little skeptical about the practical value of the bleeding edge of both experimental and theoretical physics. Interesting? Sure.

> article presumes ... everything could still be subject to a major paradigm shift. ...seems pretty unlikely

Alternatively: there's plenty of mainstream, accepted science that's plain, flat out, provably wrong. Yet, it is against good taste (job security, people's feelings, status quo bias, etc.) to point this out.

Hence, it can actually be tricky to catch wind of, or get a grasp on, such issues to begin with, much less pursue such issues toward meaningful, published, recognized change in understanding (that is to say: paradigm shift).

I'd name some examples, but you wouldn't believe me.

With respect to the article, it seems the current LLMs can (though, obviously, do not necessarily have to) return text that appears to reason (pretty reasonably!) about paradigm shifts, when given the context required and nudged quite forcefully toward particular directions. But, as the article seems to indicate, the LLMs seem to not tend toward finding, investigating, and reporting on paradigm shifts all on their own very much. (But maybe part of that is intrinsic to how they are programmed and/or their context?)

> In fact, relativity was only recently fully backed up with experimental data.

Can you elaborate on the assertion you made here? In addition to the important points @elbasti made about tests performed approximately a century ago, what does it even mean for a scientific theory to be "fully backed up"? Such theories can be tested and the tests either passed or the theory disproven but it's not possible to _prove_ such a theory. And to some extent we already know that relativity cannot be the final answer because it doesn't mesh well with quantum mechanics (which has been experimentally tested substantially, arguably even more than relativity has).

Nope. The edge for a lot of interesting science is difficult to use scientific software and scientists not using basic statistical techniques correctly.