(July 18, 2012 at 10:04 pm)RaphielDrake Wrote: Well, discovery has slowed down its pace considerably. Aside from nuclear power The Higgs boson is one of the only really big discoveries we've made in quite sometime. You could argue this is because we're now concentrating on finding answers to much more difficult questions and you'd be right. The Higgs Boson is in a whole different league from almost any discovery we've ever made let alone any from before the 1950s.
That being said there is correlation that can't be ignored. Based on that correlation the rate of discovery will continue to decrease but the significance of each discovery will increase. 200 years might not cut it.
I think you are picking arbitary milestones without regard to how much real distance is between one and the next, or whether a straight line between two miles stones is parallel or tangential to the primary direction of scientific development, and saying "well, it took us a lot longer to get from this one to that one now than the it took us to cover the two we covered 50 years ago".
You only need to look at the amount of development in electronics to see all physics is not particle physics.
