Bad New York Times! Bad, bad! (Just the headline; the public-health content is spot on, and although we have heard it a thousand times before, apparently the repetition is necessary.)
It does kind of concern me that as a society we've just kind of decided that Ponzi schemes are fine as long as we have some fancy Silicon Valley branding attached to it. WeWork is the most glaring example of a company that seemed to operate something Ponzi-adjacent and just kept growing on that until they became public and then became the shareholder's problem.
When Feynman was involved in physics the field was rapidly expanding and it would be a field that would attract truly ambitious people who want to have an impact.
When I got my PhD in 1998 the APS was projecting that 3% of us would get permanent jobs in the field. Some would say "the cream floats to the top" but in a world where I could get 30x the attention creating a web page than writing a paper, in a world where you could go into a much less competitive field (with more definite and rapid progress!) like Computer Science at the time, or where you could go into industry and become one of the founders of what was to be known as "big tech" or make your billions in finance I suspect the real cream didn't even start grad school.
The people who do get professorships can play a mean game of musical chairs, I'll grant them that, but the nature of the field is that someone who makes a major breakthrough in fundamental physics theory will probably wait 1/2 or 2/3 or all of a career to see it vindicated. For instance a major theory of how quasar jets formed from 1980 or so has recently seen some partial confirmation. The Higgs Boson was predicted in 1964 and observed in 2013 with a nearly $5 billion machine. Note this quote from Peter Higgs:
Neutrino oscillations were predicted by Bruno Pontecorvo in 1957 after he defected to the Soviet Union. He passed in 1993, oscillations were definitely observed in 2001 though we know retrospectively that oscillations explain an important experimental result from much earlier.
Another viewpoint is that Feynman and his generation solved all the easy problems and much harder ones are left.
Perhaps it is very different in some other fields. I look at biomedical papers today that blow me away in terms of how much progress has been made on understanding life in terms of chemistry, physics and such. Omics really had lived up to it's potential after a slow start. On the other hand, word is that it's even harder for young people to get established in those fields than it is physics.
Ahh right. Physics is up against the computational complexity brick wall in understanding, but vast swathes of chemistry, especially ambient condition chemistry, is moderately-cheap-benchtop-experiment driven => lots of low hanging fruit I believe, but probably tough for grand theory builders who still need tenure(though limited "unifications" still occur.. click chemistry? Quantum dots? Etc) very useful, very applicable, but not as grand as what Feynman did. A lot of Bell Labs era breakthroughs (transistor, crystal growth, laser, basic litho etc) are on the order of sophistication as some cutting edge wetchem today.
My RSS reader shows me a lot of papers in practical chemistry and I am astonished by what people are doing with Metal Organic Frameworks, Deep Eutectic Solvents, etc. (I sure wish I could get HNers to upvote some articles on these!)
Perhaps chemical recycling of plastics will always be an El Dorado like the fast breeder reactor, but it seems something is going to come out of all the efforts to cheapen hydrogen electrolysis, using CO2 as a feedstock material, figure out how to make something valuable out of cellulose better than
(the video on that page is worth watching the whole thing. My wife had bought those mushrooms and was wondering how the hell they could sell them so cheap, turns out they can grow those on straw without anybody laying a hand on them until they arrive at the grocer)
Perhaps rather the abundance of disincentives to redo things completely from scratch.
Parts of mathematical biology are still AI resistant, but otherwise, funders are not going to be happy about proposals to discard all those models/theory in order to possibly discover no better models/theory.
EDIT: that's Feynman's modus operandi, everything from first principles, avoid looking at previous work if possible.
This is why, soon enough but also too late, they will vanish from the marketplace for their physical products: they are financialized, and no financialized company can build usable products. But the rot will take a while.
The "business cycle" is not a natural phenomenon, but one that is deliberately created for the purpose of concentrating ownership on each iteration. Economists are taught that it is an intrinsically emergent phenomenon, and that hypothesis has a certain small plausibility by a strained analogy with lower-level natural phenomena, but that analogy cannot withstand clear thought or empirical observation.
