In the days of Edison and Franklin and all those other pioneers, there were not fundamentalists, with small minds and rigid outlooks who kept tabs and warned or worried. People were free to explore and enjoy the freedom of discoveries.

Unfortunately I have to agree with you we've lost that spirit!

Let me correct myself and say there probably were the worry warts and the doomsayers, but they weren't as many as they are today!!

It seems the more advanced we get, the farther back we go with our outlook of our future lives because of the discord that is going on around us!

Oh, we've definately lost the spirit...back in the day, people just got a crazy idea and went for it. Today, that doesn't really happen...or if it does than someone is ridiculed for even trying and usually gives up...or they lack the iniative to even try something new.

They may be some other things to discover...not sure if they will be recognized right away. It took decades for people to figure out how important some discoveries were...chemistry in particular took hundreds of years, from medieval alchemists and wizards to the chemists of today.

There are always possibilities, and if I find something cool, I'll let you know.

~Zoo

I imagine you'll be extremely glad to know that this year a team of scientists in Tokyo will be attempting to engineer the same events that led to the Big Bang in a 'controlled environment'. With any luck one of the possible side-effects of the experiment won't take place (the universe's implosion).

Frankly I'm happier when scientists keep their dirty mits off the engines of reality.

Yes Mason, I see your point. I don't think we've hit a brick wall of knowledge. There's just not that same sense of discovery and adventure generally in the scientific community.
If we put the same money, energy and enthusiasm into basic science that we do into discovering the umpteenth anti-inflammatory, blood pressure, or erectile dysfuction pill who knows what the spin-offs might be. When I was a boy, I fully expected we'd be building interstellar spaceships, travelling through time and flying in anti-grav cars by now. Except for the invention of the world-wide web, this scientific and technological reality is so disappointingly impotent that its well worth taking the risk of disrupting the fabric of space time to escape it.

Little-whip, here is a link to an answer from Fermi Labs re a similar experiment at Brookhaven Labs: Link

Saying that they were trying to duplicate the Big Bang is perhaps journalistic license.

MasonM, when you list the "keystone discoveries" you focused pretty much entirely on physics. How about other fields of science, including the Human Genome project, completed in 2003? Is it possible that the great scientific minds of our day have turned to other areas?

I remember when I discovered Keystone. It was way back in 1989 when I was taking some night classes at a small community college in Oklahoma and afterwards would stop at a local dive before heading home.

WWW Link

As discoveries go it was a pretty good one -smooth and best of all CHEAP. I hope there's more worthy discoveries to make, but... I dunno. Ones like that are rare as hen's teeth you know?   

Of course. These are the fundamentals upon which our technology is based. It's an article regarding these fundamentals and whether or not we have discovered them all, not the entire scope of human knowledge.

Frankly, if fire and electricity is it, we'll never travel to the stars or make any more significant technological leaps.

I suspect that this has always been the case.



That is true enough. There was a good deal of time between the initial discovery of electricity and someone actually figuring out that it could perform work for us. I believe that there are some fundamentals we have yet to really explore and master. Gravity comes to mind. We know that gravity exists and yet we still have no real idea of how it actually works beyond some theoretical mathematics.

For example we know that an intense gravity such as that associated with a "black hole" bends space itself. We think of space as just an empty void; basically nothingness. Common sense says one can't bend nothing, so space must actually be made of something. What? That could be one of the most fundamental discoveries of all time. Or a dead end. Who knows?



I've read about this and some similar experiments. Looks like an exercise in scientific oddity to me, but who knows?



Now you're hitting on my whole point. If fire and electricity really are the peaks of fundamental discoveries these things will never happen. The bulk of our technology over the past several decades has been to simply improve upon the use of electricity. It has brought us some pretty amazing things like computers, cell phones, and microwave ovens, but it's all just refinement of a basic concept. Where's the new concept that will make the things you mentioned possible? Is there one?

Two atoms bump into each other in a bar. One says 'I think I lost an electron!' The other asks, 'Are you sure?', to which the first replies, 'I'm positive.'
physics discovery I made