The moral of the story seems to be to stick in your core competencies and de-serendipitous discovery for a couple decades. If you're a theoretical physicist in

The moral of the story seems to be to stick in your core competencies and de-serendipitous discovery for a couple decades. If you're a theoretical physicist in 2117 you have a pretty good idea of what was figured out in 2020 and you can front that and collect your Nobel prize in physics and most importantly its funding. Meanwhile most of the modern world is built out of creative concepts. Huh we can create seemingly arbitrary organic chemicals what happens when ones with free double bonds get triggered into single bonding with neighbors, nobody never thought of anything that crazy and its a bazillion dollar industry now. Uranium, well, it turns glass artistically yellow otherwise pretty boring. Silicon, well, it makes a nice metallurgical addition to steel and aluminum and is "easily" purified to ridiculous levels but otherwise not terribly noteworthy. And then there's things that don't amount to anything, multiverse, strings, skip all that stuff to gain progress. Electric cars were not a "thing" for their first century, but their second is looking pretty interesting.