A fundamental breakthrough is one that could not be developed from earlier knowledge (that required a new idea) and that formed the basis for further developments. That is, not an incremental advance.
The laser, for example, was not a fundamental breakthrough, because it was a direct development of quantum electrodynamics (which is the last fundamental breakthrough I can think of).
ADDED: QCD may be, but I can’t think of any further developments it has contributed to, nor, the last I checked it out, had there been any definitive tests of its accuracy.
QED wasn’t totally original, we obviously needed some earlier knowledge- like say about the photoelectric effect, black body radiation, and Maxwell’s wave theory of light. Maybe the conceptual jump to QED was bigger than the jump to lasers and so maybe it is fair to say that we haven’t has a big a breakthrough since. But I’m not sure what justifies putting a very small set of breakthroughs in a special category and only counting those. Is there a long enough list of breakthroughs as big as QED to even justify looking at the frequency with which they occur?
A fundamental breakthrough is one that could not be developed from earlier knowledge (that required a new idea) and that formed the basis for further developments. That is, not an incremental advance.
The laser, for example, was not a fundamental breakthrough, because it was a direct development of quantum electrodynamics (which is the last fundamental breakthrough I can think of).
ADDED: QCD may be, but I can’t think of any further developments it has contributed to, nor, the last I checked it out, had there been any definitive tests of its accuracy.
QED wasn’t totally original, we obviously needed some earlier knowledge- like say about the photoelectric effect, black body radiation, and Maxwell’s wave theory of light. Maybe the conceptual jump to QED was bigger than the jump to lasers and so maybe it is fair to say that we haven’t has a big a breakthrough since. But I’m not sure what justifies putting a very small set of breakthroughs in a special category and only counting those. Is there a long enough list of breakthroughs as big as QED to even justify looking at the frequency with which they occur?