As a physicist for the last 20 years, I suppose I am to partly to blame... ;) I would say that it depends on what you call physics. The areas of physics that

As a physicist for the last 20 years, I suppose I am to partly to blame... ;) I would say that it depends on what you call physics. The areas of physics that were symbolic of advancement in the previous 20 years will not necessarily be the same areas where advances will be in the next 20 years. During the 1800s, advances in physics in the first half of the century lead to technological advances in steam power and electricity in the second half. If you thought of physics as meaning electromagnetism and thermodynamics, you might think that there were few advances in physics in the first half of the 20th century. And there were people that felt that way! But I think that nowadays we would think that Einstein's heyday was an era of major physics advances. So, maybe you shouldn't look at those areas that are reaching the plateau of their sigmoid curve, but newer areas. Classic particle physics, exemplified by the likes of Chadwick and Lawrence way back in the 1930s, leading to the explosion of the particle zoo in the 1950s, and then the diminishing returns of the LHC era, would be a good example of sigmoid curve development in Physics. If physics only means this stuff to you, then yes, it is going slower than it was. Areas of physics that have been closer to the high slope region of their development in the last 20 years: Quantum Information Theory (as noted by @abdullahkhalids) Dark Matter/Energy/whatevertheheckitis Medical Physics (from lead block linacs and xrays to IMRT/VMAT & modern imaging) Materials Science/'Condensed Matter' physics Black Hole science, esp. thermodynamics Gravity waves, or the lack thereof (interesting either way) techniques for signal/data processing and analysis (such as superresolution or single detector imaging) I'm sure there's more that I'm not aware of. Anything that is really very new is too small to get much press right now. Pretty much by definition, the new small stuff won't have the big press budget of CERN or NASA.