Adapted from: [Joe Rogan Experience #1453 - Eric Weinstein] (Apr 3, 2020)
We've been stalled out for almost 50 years in theoretical physics. The simplest way of saying it is no one younger than Frank Wilczek, who was born in 1951, has gone to Stockholm for a discovery in theoretical fundamental physics.
Something bizarre happened in the early 1970s that we should all be talking about that almost nobody knows about. One of the things that happened was that physics effectively came to an end.
The "prestige" part of physics came to an end in the early 70s when everything changed across the board. We had a broad economic change in our world. See GDP (gross domestic product) versus median male income. From 1947 until about 1973, GDP and median male income are going up inlockstep, they're almost perfectly correlated. And then abruptly, median male income flatlines from about 1973 to 2010 on this graph, and GDP keeps going up. Median male income is irrelevant, it's just one indicator that's particularly clean.
My belief is that since the early 70s, very little in our society has been progressing. That's not true for computers - that's been like the big bright spot. It's not true for [oil] fracking. There's some innovations in imaging.
But in general, in an average room, if you subtract off the screens, you can't definitely tell that room didn't exist in 1973.
Because we stopped growing, we got crazy, because everything was built on growth. Everything was a scheme that became a Ponzi scheme when growth ran out. So we've sort of been hollowing ourselves out from that time, and getting crazier and farther away from reality, and we have to actually figure out where we are.
My belief was that our economy was almost completely created by theoretical physics. Theoretical physics underlies chemistry, so the chemical revolutions, like plastics. It gave us the semiconductor from which we do our computing. It give us the World Wide Web, which came out of CERN. It gave us telecommunications, which use the electromagnetic spectrum. It gives us medical imaging.
We don't really appreciate that theoretical physics has been the great success story of our time, and the theoretical physics community is the intellectual SEAL Team six of the world. We underpay them. They're under-resourced. They're now completely unethical because we've underpaid them.