I find my physics education useful nearly every day in my job for a large semiconductor chip manufacturer, and I am still glad that I struggled through a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, about a decade ago. However, I agree with Anita Mehta ( Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 61 6 2008 50 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2947649 June 2008, page 50 ) when she suggests that the physics research enterprise must overcome challenges if it is to remain relevant.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, one of Max Planck’s professors famously declared that there was nothing significant left to be discovered in physics. Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics followed; physics became paramount when the atom bomb helped end World War II and largely maintained the global peace for decades afterwards.
Times have changed. The Soviet Union is gone. The challenges with global climate change are also mostly political and economic. The microelectronics revolution has transformed the world, but with personal computers, cell phones, and the internet being everywhere, it is easy to take the underlying physics for granted. Do most people care, for instance, that the storage of songs and videos in iPods depends on the precise control of electrons’ quantum tunneling through an insulating barrier?
Nearly all the practical successes of physics in the recent past are the consequences of physical understanding developed more than half a century ago. Meanwhile, nuclear fusion remains unavailable for power generation; high-temperature superconductivity is inadequately understood; and no mass-market application of carbon nanotubes has yet been found.
So what is new, and why should the taxpaying layperson care? Any new research proposal raises two pertinent questions: Is it likely to reveal anything fundamentally new about how nature works? If only confirming established physical theories, is the work going to be of any practical consequence in the near term?
Physics, like everything else, has to compete in the marketplace of ideas. Further inquiry in physics may remain relevant only if it continues to be widely perceived as a useful art or otherwise generates concepts that excite the imagination of young people.
