I think a large part of the reason why it feels like we’re in a scientific and technical rut these days is because we’re well past the point where the cutting edge is accessible to the layman, or even someone well-versed in a different field. There’s an incredible amount of research going on, and lots of it will bear fruit soon, but that fruit will be absolutely indistinguishable from magic to most of us.
Modern man has been around for something like 200,000 years. So it seems reasonable that we should wait for a stagnant period of at least a few hundred years before concluding that we’ve figured it all out.
I, for one, see little evidence that we are entering such a period. Check back in 20 years.
Or, in fact, it already is to most people. To quote from [POST=9956598]another thread[/POST]:
I would estimate this to be at about the time that the electric incandescent lamp became commercially available (~1880), giving steady and unwavering illumination at the flick of a switch without any visible sign of combustion or energy generation. Although it is a trivial exercise to draw a circuit diagram of a lamp, power supply, and switch, this may as well be a rune to most people; it certainly doesn’t describe the underlying mechanics for which we have to go back to Ampère, Maxwell, and Heaviside whose work, even for most casual students of science today, is as indecipherable as a shaman’s chant or sorcerer’s incantation.
And I daresay that the vast majority of people have absolutely no clue how a computer allows one to draft and send a message from one side of the planet to another with slight delay. “A series of tubes” is literally how most people think of the Internet, and their computer is nothing more than an enchanted black box.
Stranger