Makes sense about the cars. I'm just happy we're doing cutting edge stuff again that could, hopefully, start to pay off in a few decades. As for the physics st

Makes sense about the cars. I'm just happy we're doing cutting edge stuff again that could, hopefully, start to pay off in a few decades. As for the physics stuff: don't you think that Newton was a reason that the Industrial Revolution took off in England first? As for the Quantum/Relativistic physicists: they were quite distributed, but I would argue that during the important years (i.e., the few decades immediately following their theoretical breakthroughs), they were more concentrated in the United States than anywhere else. It takes at least a few decades, usually, to find applications (e.g, lasers or transistors) for theory.