To be fair, it is pretty hard to invent really something new nowadays.
I would advise against adopting this narrative. I can't think of anything really new at the moment. However, it seems to me that it is surely is the case that there is always something new that most of us are simply failing to think of. My lack of imagination shouldn't be the metric by which we measure the possibilities of the future. We could probably find examples from a thousand years ago of people expressing something similar, that it has all been done, that we already know everything there is to know, that it's all just repetition, and so on. I seem to remember that in the scientific community, before relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which were huge revelations, there were experts who believed physics was just about wrapped up, that almost everything was known. There were just these few remaining little loose ends...
I can't justify my belief that there is more to discover, as obviously I can't think of any new things, but I have faith that many discoveries are still waiting for us. It's that Rumsfeld thing about knowns, known unknowns, and then the unknown unknowns. We have now idea how big the realm of unknown unknowns actually is.
I would hesitate to discourage young people with such a pessimistic idea as the above quote. Maybe it's true. I don't know. But we should all proceed with the faith that it isn't. Otherwise, what?
Statistics: Posted by JO512 — Wed Jan 22, 2025 12:24 am