Hard sciences have an inherent problem. Building prototypes costs money and there is no undo button. For our final year project, we spent 100k out of our pocket and didn't even get to the part that we wanted to innovate on. Woh alag baat hai ke we won the gold medal. But who knew that there isn't any gold in a gold medal. So effectively useless. Anyways, this problem of costs that can't be undone makes it nearly impossible for individuals to innovate. After spending 10 years of your life on Physics, you have little to nothing to show for it. Because you can't implement it. And so you can't commercialize it. Edison made great inventions, but his true genius was in how he was able finance and commercialize those inventions. Dyson begged companies to finance his designs. No company did. The only reason we have vacuums that don't lose more than half their suction power in their 3rd minute of use is that Dyson bet his life on it. Sold his house and spent his life's savings just to bring the design to market. It obviously paid off. But he had to do it on his own. The reason big companies don't invest in inventions by outsiders is because most of these people making tall claims are actually selling snake oil. The few that aren't also get caught up in this filter. Worse yet, the structure of big companies also resists any internal innovation. So if had a design that could reduce the energy consumption of air conditioners by 30%, it's not that the path for taking to market would be complicated. In fact, the path to taking physical inventions to market is very simple. It's just that this straight path is usually on the seabed. Simple but practically impossible to take. So in physical sciences, the only thing left to do is to try to convince others of what you know. But that's even more difficult than financing it. Because even the smallest concept has dozens of aspects. And a explaining a single one can take forever. And the more someone's experience in the field, the less likely they are to entertain the idea that they might be wrong . I once had a disagreement with a PhD while we were working on a project. We argued for over half an hour. The only reason that argument ended was because another PhD came into the office and the first one said "bache ko batain yeh kese ghalat hai" to which the second PhD replied ke "bacha sahi keh raha hai". Which brings me to my point, in a field like programming, if you know something that others don't, you can make money from it. In physical sciences, if you know something better than others, you can only get the headache of trying to convince others. So innovation in physical sciences is slower than in fields like programming not because inventions in physical sciences have been exhausted, only that the ones that could've been done for cheap have been. We need microservices like AWS but for physical sciences.