Do you have reason to believe we will never collect surprising observations?
Sure, it’s likely we’ll get some new surprising observations before we nail down the TOE. The question is just about how surprising, and whether they will let us upend physical limits. Agreed that there’s a lot of new interesting things we could observe, but for most of your examples, I don’t think we have good reason to think that we’ll learn new things about fundamental physics from them.
Let me rephrase my objection. I think my main issue with your post can be found in this phrase near the beginning: you speak of the “rate at which we have constantly upended our own physical theories”. I don’t think that progress in fundamental physics is like technological progress or other things which happen at a steady rate per unit effort. It’s more like exploiting a non-renewable resource: our ignorance of physical phenomena. So 400 years ago we basically started with a huge ‘reservoir’ of ignorance, which has gradually been drained as our theories improved, until now there’s only a few small pools left that we can see. The reason that we’ve seen steady progress until recently is due to our slow draining of this reservoir, so now that it’s mostly gone, we no longer have a reason to expect further such steady progress. It’s possible that we might find new reservoirs someday, but equally possible that we won’t, so it’s a reasonable assumption that many of our current theories’ physical limits will continue to apply indefinitely into the future.
Sure, it’s likely we’ll get some new surprising observations before we nail down the TOE. The question is just about how surprising, and whether they will let us upend physical limits. Agreed that there’s a lot of new interesting things we could observe, but for most of your examples, I don’t think we have good reason to think that we’ll learn new things about fundamental physics from them.
Let me rephrase my objection. I think my main issue with your post can be found in this phrase near the beginning: you speak of the “rate at which we have constantly upended our own physical theories”. I don’t think that progress in fundamental physics is like technological progress or other things which happen at a steady rate per unit effort. It’s more like exploiting a non-renewable resource: our ignorance of physical phenomena. So 400 years ago we basically started with a huge ‘reservoir’ of ignorance, which has gradually been drained as our theories improved, until now there’s only a few small pools left that we can see. The reason that we’ve seen steady progress until recently is due to our slow draining of this reservoir, so now that it’s mostly gone, we no longer have a reason to expect further such steady progress. It’s possible that we might find new reservoirs someday, but equally possible that we won’t, so it’s a reasonable assumption that many of our current theories’ physical limits will continue to apply indefinitely into the future.