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I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
Off the top of my head:
Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.
Quantum Physics: I firmly believe we’ll have a pretty good idea how it all works, probably by 2050.
I’ll agree with the idea of dietary guidelines being much better than now, but I don’t think it’s that we have absolutely no idea how it works so much is that nobody actually likes the results. Food manufacturers do not want to hear and the public doesn’t like. Basically the solution is to eat mostly vegetables with meat and starches being about a quarter of the meal each. Eat as minimally processed as you can, and avoid refined carbs. It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s that we don’t like that kind of food, and billions are made catering to what people want even though we know it’s bad.
I took a first-year Computer Science course ten-ish years ago, and at the end the prof said: "If you went back in time 50 years with what you know now, you'd be one of the most knowledgeable Computer Scientists alive."
We were doing simple things like algorithmic complexity, sorting algorithms, linked lists, binary trees, and object-oriented programming (and did conditions, loops, control flow, etc. in the previous class), and...he might not have been exaggerating. A lot of the things we learned were discovered/created in the past 50 years, and they aren't just minor pieces of trivia.
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What part of quantum physics do you think isn’t understood? Quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern physics so much so that it seems very mundane by the time you're done with grad school. It's not only the relevant to what's going on in physics-y things like colliders and quantim computers but it's the basis of our understanding of the properties of materials, chemical reactions, MRI, transistors, and geckos' feet.
There are two pieces of quantum mechanics that don't quite mesh with other things we know about reality. The first is quantum gravity, which the physics community thought was just around the corner for decades, and which now I think most people feel we aren’t going to definitively answer until we can probe significantly higher enery scales to be certain which of the possible approaches is correct. Most people don't really expect this to change what we understand about the way quantum mechanics works (which you can derivce from classical physics plus the uncertainty principle). I fully do not believe that quantum gravity will be figured out by 2050, because it hasn't happened in the last 80 years, and we've been stuck at the "maybe string theory?" stage for about 50.
The second "missing piece" is related to decoherence and wave function collapse. It's weird the extent to which certain parts of the community think this is a solved problem by just hand-waving it all as decoherence. But a diagonal density matrix isn't the same as picking one specific outcome, and so you need something like many worlds (which actually has a significant problem in that probabilities don't emerge correctly, which is generally also ignored) to ensure everone only sees one outcome.
I don't expect this to be solved by 2050 either because A) vanishingly few people seem to care B) the answer doesn’t affect much of anything C) most hypothetical sutions are untestable even in principal (some involve non linearities or relationships between mass and collapse rate that are testable in principal, but I think most of those have been ruled out).
This. Our current understanding of quantum physics is ultimately called the standard model of particle physics. This theory basically got its finishing touches mid-1970. Since then, we have found a few missing pieces of the puzzle predicted by the SM, such as the top quark or the Higgs.
Besides the open questions which were apparent ca. 1975 (Can we unify the strong and electroweak interaction? How the fuck should gravity fit into all of that?), we have found a few more puzzles (e.g. so at least some neutrinos have mass, dark matter seems to be implied by astronomical observations).
These open problems have been attracting theoretical physicists -- and I have no reason to believe that the current top theoreticians are simply less smart than Einstein or Dirac. So far, we have not made enough progress that one could confidently predict a timeline. If we do not get an AI-powered singularity, it seems certainly possible that by 2125, the progress we will have made is that our best candidate from string theory will be somewhat less ruled out by the SM.
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