So, as fastaguy88 already described in another comment, this paper is a fairly arbitrary quantification of “disruptive”. (Also, can we just stop using that word

So, as fastaguy88 already described in another comment, this paper is a fairly arbitrary quantification of “disruptive”. (Also, can we just stop using that word? Such a though-terminating cliche at this point.) But let’s accept that we are seeing less fundamental breakthroughs in science. Is that a failure of the system…or, depressingly, what if we really are hitting the limits of what we can model and describe? In a roughly 200 year timespan, we figured out the at least the rough outlines of…wow, where even to start…electromagnetism, general and special relativity, quantum mechanics as it relates to field theories and chemistry, genetics, and computability. We really picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit, and what if there just isn’t any fruit left to easily get at? There’s certainly things like dark energy that we don’t have particularly satisfying theories for at all, but, the basics? We seem to have good models.