There seems to be a rough rule that new fundamental discoveries (e.g. new theories like thermodynamics, QM, GRT) are turned into auccessful applications for the

There seems to be a rough rule that new fundamental discoveries (e.g. new theories like thermodynamics, QM, GRT) are turned into auccessful applications for the masses some 50 to 70 years later. It's a rule of thumb at best, but it holds for quite a few cases. The trouble then is: what were the major new discoveries of the last 50 years? Science has mostly confirmed and fleshed out existing knowledge. So engineers are mostly stuck with optimizing what we have instead of coming up with things that are fundamentally new and foreign.