Slightly related: One thing I've learnt in Physics is that there are still a huge number of practical and fundamental problems to be solved. You might expect everything easy will already be done by now but that's just not true. Hence we still manage to write so many papers! In fact many Physicists have too many papers they want to write and not enough time to write them. This was a huge surprise for me coming in to my PhD. I had naively assumed that physicists were all scrounging for any morsel of content to publish!!
Of course it depends on the field. It's a requirement here in the UK to publish a paper to get your PhD (at least I've been led to believe that), and many particle physics students really struggle to manage to fulfill this. On the other hand gravitational wave detectors have a huge amount of unexplored science as there are so many things that we still do not fully understand about the detectors themselves.
I agree with this big time. One of my favorite Feynman quotes is that science is an "expanding frontier of ignorance". There is always somewhere to go and something on the other side, that may change everything and invalidate deeply held convictions forever, all it takes is the guts to, again quoting Feynman, "be willing to stick your neck out".
Oh, I'm sure there are lots of things to discover, but I think this underestimates what it takes to actually know enough to find the frontier and decide on a good problem to solve.
While Feynman is correct on expanding the frontier of ignorance Asimov is also correct about the relativity of wrong (that we come asymptotically closer to the truth). This is why people think most of physics is solved, because in the context of what most people need it is extremely accurate.
> It's a requirement here in the UK to publish a paper to get your PhD
Categorically false. I did my physics PhD in the UK and while I did publish a paper, it was not a requirement and I have plenty of friends who did not publish a paper and still got their physics PhD.
Just yesterday I was watching a video about machining flat surfaces, and it was mentioned that the reason why two very flat surfaces stick together isn't thoroughly understood yet.
We can build things that deal with unimaginable precision, create new elements, compute with quantum effects, but we don't know why flat things stick together?
To put it simply, two clean flat surfaces stick together for the same reason each of the two objects is held together in the first place: weak and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetism. However the specifics of this might vary greatly depending on the material and other circumstances.
I believe that even if humanity were given a book that perfectly describes physics on the smallest levels, there'll still be hundreds of years of work to find useful approximations and abstractions.
That's of course nevermind the effort involved in grokking the book. Especially, if particles are more subdivided than we think/know they are.
Think of it as knowing the rules of the game vs developing strategies for it.
Of course it depends on the field. It's a requirement here in the UK to publish a paper to get your PhD (at least I've been led to believe that), and many particle physics students really struggle to manage to fulfill this. On the other hand gravitational wave detectors have a huge amount of unexplored science as there are so many things that we still do not fully understand about the detectors themselves.