Yeah, it’s been kind of a quiet one. In recent years we had CRISPR, gravitational waves detected, a couple records broken for high-temperature superconductors, that sort of thing. Metallic hydrogen is probably the most distinct landmark on the list, everything else is incremental work.
Though don’t get me wrong—most of the valuable work done by scientists is the incremental work that the public never really needs to know about. Sometimes you gather a bunch of data to test a bold new theory, and the bold new theory turns out to be wrong, and nobody will remember in 10 years, and that’s fine.
Yeah, it’s been kind of a quiet one. In recent years we had CRISPR, gravitational waves detected, a couple records broken for high-temperature superconductors, that sort of thing. Metallic hydrogen is probably the most distinct landmark on the list, everything else is incremental work.
Though don’t get me wrong—most of the valuable work done by scientists is the incremental work that the public never really needs to know about. Sometimes you gather a bunch of data to test a bold new theory, and the bold new theory turns out to be wrong, and nobody will remember in 10 years, and that’s fine.