Personally I think the ER=EPR conjecture and the complexity/action duality hypothesis are incredibly interesting. Technically ER=EPR was formulated in 2000s (maybe 90s?) and CA-duality is approaching if not just past 10 years old, but the thing about asking for breakthroughs is that they take a while to percolate. Ex Hawking radiation wasn't formulated until, like, 50-70 years after the "basis" (schwarzshild, Schrodinger) was formed.
There's also been a ton of productive research integrsting computer science and physics lately ( on hn last week: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16850 and 2022 novel prize; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-n...)
Also JWST just keeps on giving, and gravitational waves were only confirmed in 2017. If you extend a bit further higgs was in the 2010s
So, in summary, in the late 10 years - we've shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper) - proposed some novel yet elegant theories (CA-duality, and I'd hope you'd begrudge me er=EPR) - confirmed some insane provings to the underlying reality (gravitational waves)
If those aren't noteworthy, I'd ask what you consider noteworthy any why you consider it noteworthy
There have been almost no truly significant, novel predictions that have a hope in hell of panning out in like, 40 years or more. The only mildly interesting, novel idea in physics has been quantum computing, and even that was first published in 1980.
> So, in summary, in the late 10 years - we've shown a break in our intuition of physics (nonloca-realness, that 2022 paper)
This paper showed no such thing, it has the same superdeterminism loophole as every other paper attempting to refute local realism.
Physics is stuck in a local QM-GR minimum, and some truly novel ideas are needed to kickstart things again. Oppenheim's postquantum gravity is the first truly novel idea I've seen in awhile.
I also agree that JWST is giving us great data, some of which has placed LCDM on the ropes, but astrophysicists are hard at work adding epicycles to keep it alive.
You can't rhetorically gloss over something as important as experimentally validating a 1964 prediction as though it doesn't matter or didn't happen.
If your contention is that a validation of something we already suspected to be true doesn't shatter/shift our paradigm, then how often would you expect that to happen? I would expect it a lot in small ways (so almost every person working in some niche area has probably had some "niche breakthrough" happen in their area that has really changed things) but not a lot in really fundamental overarching ways which for physics I think you could reasonably say has happened about 4 or 5 times in the last 400 years maybe idk: Newton, GR/SR/ quantum mechanics and then whichever ones you want to count out of Maxwell's equations and whatnot.
So to expect something like that every decade is not realistic.
I'm not, I'm pointing out that theoretical progress has stagnated. Experimentalists are doing great.
> So to expect something like that every decade is not realistic.
I'm not expecting it every decade, but we've had 4 decades of recycling the same ideas using the same failed approaches to try to patch gaps in existing theory using bogus arguments, which ends up funding poorly motivated experiments that then find nothing. I think Sabine Hossenfelder elaborated the problems here in excellent detail (see "Lost in Math").
Higgs/Bell/GW were experimental results, I was indeed trying to show that there's a huge lag between prediction and observation.
Imo the paradigm shift that we're slowly undergoing is thinking about physics from a information theoretic perspective instead of a kinematics one. I'd argue that's even more fundamental of a change than Newtonian physics to early GR & QM.
CA-duality is again mathematically interesting, but physically dubious because it's based on anti-de Sitter space, which does not describe our universe.
Information theoretical formulations of QM are mildly interesting, but I don't think they will be revolutionary, and I don't think they are tackling the core problem, which is QM's linearity where we classically observe a non-linear universe.
I suspect "breakthrough" is supposed to mean "huge definitive paradigm shift." We haven't had many of those in all of history, and we certainly haven't had one in the last decade.
Everyone is still very, very confused about quantum fundamentals. Non-local realness is really a Bohmian idea, and that's certainly not new. Universe-as-information is new but there's a huge gap between that and the Standard Model.
And so on. None of these problems are settled in the way that GR and QM settled various issues.
You may say that's too high a bar and things are moving. But there's been more of a history of missteps (string theory, supersymmetry, so far at least) that were sold as potential breakthroughs than genuinely transformative insights.