Karl,
It's true that advances in physics in the early 1900's caught the attention of the general public much more than the do now, but that's only because those advances were so counter intuitive. Space curves? Matter being both waves and particles? New advances don't turn prople's heads so much.
But what about the idea that there are questions -- real ones, not "artificial questions as in Gödel's work -- that may be undecidable? Take a look at the current, October issue, of Scientific American. The ideas in the article The Unsolvable Problem seems to me are stunning and just as profound as the ones of a hundred years ago. But the public says, "meh"?
New light sources? A lot of that is applied physics (I'm NOT phoo-phooing it, but it's not the same).
On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 5:37 AM Karl Shah-Jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A friend passed the comment 'physics hasn't given the world anything for 100 years', whether in jest or honestly I don't know but I let it pass as by and large there's some truth to it, a whole lot of the natural world philosophy was laid down a long time back..
Stumbling about the web in the undisciplined way I do I did find something new that caught my eye, the 1990's invention of sulfur lamps
They work by excitation of sufur in a vacuum by microwaves to produce plasma which releases a continuous spectral light output - these look pretty magical from an electronics perspective , little IR emission, almost no UV and a really good electrical conversion to light, there's one company apparently still making them, Hive Lighting who claim their 1k light yields the same light levels as a 5k tungsten globe (remembering how much IR a tungsten gives off, this is pretty neat)
anyhoo, just sharing but if anyone's played with these I'd love to hear what you think of them?
karl
