Why was the first half of the last century full of fundamental discoveries in physics like the photoelectric effect, Quantum physics, Nature of light etc, but no significant discoveries are made since the 60s ? Did we become so obsessed with building new tech and optimizing the existing ones to the extent that we forgot about fundamentals?
> Why there were no fundamental discoveries in physics since the quarks in 1968?<p>There have been; 1968 was the first physical evidence supporting quarks, but the top quark wasn't observed until 1995.<p>That's kind of important, because a <i>lot</i> of effort between 1968 and 1995 went into fleshing out the theory around the quark model and confirming it, including hunting down the theorized ones not yet observed. Heck, the six quark model wasn't even <i>proposed</i> until the 1970s, much less confirmed.<p>Now, if you want to revise the question to “since 1995”...<p>Then we’ll talk about the Higgs boson, theorized in 1964 (just like the original quarks) but confirmed in 2012.
I think you are making the mistake of assuming that there is always something more fundamental to discover. It could be that we have now discovered all the pieces of the puzzle, all the building blocks are now known about. Maybe the LHC has not discovered anything new, apart from confirming the Higgs, because there is nothing more to be found.<p>Maybe the issue that is that we cannot work out the theory, the equations that correctly describe it all properly. Maybe dark energy and dark matter and not actually 'other stuff' but just an indication that there are errors in our theories. Fix the theory and the 'other stuff' disappears. Quantum physics and General Relativity need to be combined at some point and doing so may resolve everything! Or it could simply be that human intelligence is not capable of finding the solution. In the same way a dog is never going to understand calculus, maybe you need an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000 to solve physics.
My theory is that after a few generations we've treated Science as a truth, and not a process. Science should be displacing existing science. There are likely some things that we have understood wrong, but nobody is out there trying to actively disprove what we know of physics. Nobody can get funded trying alternative hypotheses that explain the same phenomena.<p>This might also be because there are no new phenomena to explain. There's a lot of resistance to observing new and old phenomena because that can "disprove science", as if there's some war between science and some kind of alternative. For example, ghosts have been observed by millions, but instead of finding some solid hypotheses for these, we dismiss them as some kind of mental illness in observers. Ghost hunters use electrical signals or some similar sensors, and we dismiss them too, instead of trying to find out what is causing these signals.<p>A lot of scientific work still happens in fields like psychology/cognitive science, or medicine, which people intuitively feel are off. But little in physics.
This idea is circulating in the web, but it's just cherrypicking what important and discover means to create a storm in a teacup. The main problem is that the experiments are very expensive and the pipeline from the theoretical idea to the experimental confirmation has become too long. So you must wait a few decades to see which of the weird current theories is the correct one.<p>Note that the bottom quark were discovered in 1974, and everybody expected to see the top quark then, but it was confirmed in 1995. So that push the dates at least 10 years or more.<p>The neutrino oscillation was discovered in 2001, and it forces a change in the "Standard model" to add mass to the neutrinos. Depending on how you count, this may reduce a few decades the time of no new things.<p>This year there was an announcement of a possible fourth neutrino, it's unconfirmed because they have only 4.5 sigmas, but it is very promising.