I think we have gotten better at this and our exploration of reality has been both deeper and wider, meaning there are not that many low hanging fruits available. Now I’m not a physicist but I’m a mathematician, and in maths I don’t expect us to find big gaps in our theories like they did in the 19th century, because we have gotten much more rigorous due to those early pitfalls.
(also I’d argue that there is not much we can do, engineering wise, due to relativity/quantum mechanic—for example the GPS uses general relativity, but in a world where Newtonian mechanic is true, we could still have made the GPS and it would in fact have been easier).
This echoes the sentiment of many prominent scientists in the late 1800s. All that was left was to resolve a few nagging irregularities.
I think we have gotten better at this and our exploration of reality has been both deeper and wider, meaning there are not that many low hanging fruits available. Now I’m not a physicist but I’m a mathematician, and in maths I don’t expect us to find big gaps in our theories like they did in the 19th century, because we have gotten much more rigorous due to those early pitfalls.
(also I’d argue that there is not much we can do, engineering wise, due to relativity/quantum mechanic—for example the GPS uses general relativity, but in a world where Newtonian mechanic is true, we could still have made the GPS and it would in fact have been easier).
Such nagging irregularities included things like “how does the Sun shine”. Current unexplained phenomena are much more exotic.
Exactly this. The rest, those little irregularities, at the time didn’t matter, because we didn’t know what we didn’t know.
No? The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood. Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood. That was not true 100 years ago, and that is true now. This is not actually a controversial statement.