Whats the point of modern science?

[Jackalope]

there hasn't been, for example, a new discovery in particle physics for something like 40 years.

This sounded like bullshit to me, and about 10 seconds with Google confirmed it:

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of...iscoveries

1974: J/ψ meson discovered by groups headed by Burton Richter and Samuel Ting, demonstrating the existence of the charm quark[23][24] (proposed by James Bjorken and Sheldon Lee Glashow in 1964[25])
1975: Tau discovered by a group headed by Martin Perl[26]
1977: Upsilon meson discovered at Fermilab, demonstrating the existence of the bottom quark[27] (proposed by Kobayashi and Maskawa in 1973)
1979: Gluon observed indirectly in three jet events at DESY[28]
1983: W and Z bosons discovered by Carlo Rubbia, Simon van der Meer, and the CERN UA1 collaboration[29][30] (predicted in detail by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg)
1995: Top quark discovered at Fermilab[31][32]
1995: Antihydrogen produced and measured by the LEAR experiment at CERN[33]
2000: Tau neutrino first observed directly at Fermilab[34]
2011: Antihelium-4 produced and measured by the STAR detector; the first particle to be discovered by the experiment
2012: A particle exhibiting most of the predicted characteristics of the Higgs boson discovered by researchers conducting the Compact Muon Solenoid and ATLAS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider[35]