>There’s a big meta-question, pertaining to pace of progress: How will the process of scientific research itself change? I suspect that progress on certain kin

>There’s a big meta-question, pertaining to pace of progress: How will the process of scientific research itself change? I suspect that progress on certain kinds of science, especially physics, will slow. The reason is that confirming things at finer and finer grains of detail experimentally gets multiple orders of magnitude more expensive over time. For example, Newton managed to empirically test many of his ideas by himself, in a cottage, with minimal equipment. Later discoveries have required fully-staffed laboratories, later still and we needed to construct multi-billion dollar supercolliders and deep space missions to empirically test our ideas. As a layman, I've read that it could take solar-system sized experiments to test theories like String Theory. Eventually, the cost becomes too great in absolute terms and "real" discovery slows. (Theory will continue to develop, but it will be based on shakier and shakier foundations over time. Eventually we'll need experimental confirmation or what we are doing is no longer "science").