[Joe Brower]

Mine is only a layman's view of all of this, but I think it's a rather appropriate irony that as we get closer and closer to the ultimate nature of reality, the more unreal it becomes.

It does seem that high energy physics has indeed been spinning it's wheels for many years now. It wouldn't surprise me if, in the coming years, some little fellow from Pakistan comes along with a completely new perspective that tosses the last two decades of work out the window.

[Doctor Stochastic]

. It wouldn't surprise me if, in the coming years, some little fellow from Pakistan comes along with a completely new perspective that tosses the last two decades of work out the window.

It's happened once already.

[Physicist]

It does seem that high energy physics has indeed been spinning it's wheels for many years now. It wouldn't surprise me if, in the coming years, some little fellow from Pakistan comes along with a completely new perspective that tosses the last two decades of work out the window.

It has certainly been spinning its wheels, and many little fellows have come along with many new perspectives. We don't lack ideas; those we have in spades. The problem is that we don't have any new experimental data that we could use to separate the relevant ideas from the irrelevant, the good from the bad, the useful from the useless. The highest-energy accelerator in the world is the Tevatron at Fermilab, which was built in the 1980's. We now have a pretty good handle on the physics at that energy scale; to get any deeper understanding requires more energetic collisions.

In the next five years a higher-energy accelerator will finally come online, the LHC at CERN. Then we will be able to resume progress.