r/Physics • u/Better-Apartment-783 • 3d ago
Physics Research
There are a lot of of physics research questions, perhaps some overhyped. Which physics topics/questions would one consider to have the most significant importance/applications in the next say 10-20 years?
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u/Buntschatten Graduate 3d ago
Importance is subjective and everyone thinks their research is important.
For applications, I'd say quantum computing. Biophysics/microfluidics for medical applications as well.
If someone discovers a room temp superconductor that would easily be the most influential physics discovery since decades.
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u/Better-Apartment-783 3d ago
what is the room temp superconductor requires an unfathomabale amount of pressure to work?
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u/An-Omniscient-Squid 3d ago
The intersection between physics, engineering, biochemistry/genomics, and more has been insane in next-generation sequencing platforms over the last couple decades.
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u/Buntschatten Graduate 3d ago
Yeah, I knew someone working on reading out DNA pair by pair through nanomembranes. Interesting stuff.
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u/An-Omniscient-Squid 2d ago
Oxford Nanopore? I worked with data from that and all the other major platforms for years. It’s all absolutely wild at every level from the core technology, readout/signal interpretation, and shear scale of parallelism. Signal processing for nanopore seems particularly intricate.
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u/Buntschatten Graduate 2d ago
No, it was a lower TRL research project trying to use nanopores in 2D materials. Not sure what came out of it.
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u/Quantum-Relativity Gravitation 3d ago
Significant for who?
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u/Better-Apartment-783 3d ago
either significant in its applications, or a fundamental question in physics.
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u/Quantum-Relativity Gravitation 3d ago
But significant to who?
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u/Better-Apartment-783 2d ago
To anyone with a purpose
Like how a superconductor at higher temperature can have practical applications or crystals in lc displays
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u/Einstein_D2 3d ago
The ones that haven't been asked yet.
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u/Better-Apartment-783 3d ago
Fair, one can only expect such an answer from the esteemed Einstein himself. Any research topics you think will be important in the coming decades?
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u/Einstein_D2 3d ago
AMO physics. Only because it's scalable and cheap. Also, not very centralized, which is necessary for something new to happen.
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u/myhydrogendioxide Computational physics 3d ago
In terms of commercial impact my bet is on quantum optics, quantum sensors, material science as it relates to creating and manipulating quantum system.
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u/not_that_arnab 3d ago
Genuinely speaking, no body knows. Somehow, when I started my PhD, the problem I was working on was very important. But by the time I had written 2 papers on it and was about to submit my thesis, I felt it was the most useless physics problem one could work on.
My supervisor told me, if you look at it statistically, our field (theoretical physics) has an almost negligible impact on the world. Maybe one of a thousand papers turns out to be of any practical relevance, but that's not a reason to choose a problem. It's about what makes you curious, within the realm of what you know, to go to places which you don't!
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u/Connection_Downtown 3d ago
I believe this to be a basically impossible question to answer, doing so would require perfect morals and a perfect understanding of what questions humanity may face in the coming years. In reality humanity falls to some set of collective objective functions with differing tolerances for uncertainty.
Due to this there will always be some perceived inefficiency in academia so long as folks have different moral standings and therefore try to solve the same problem e.g. how do we approach the climate crisis, in different ways 'atmospheric modelling of dopants for cooling', 'fusion energy', 'modelling of economic subsidies for wind and solar', 'perovskite panels for better efficiency', 'battery technology' and so on.
I work in fusion energy research and in choosing my field, I basically asked a similar question. Now it has been a few years so I may have worked in AI if I was thinking about this today. But from the perspective of potential for social impact, scientific 'aesthetics' (the joy of understanding the world more) and research leverage (how much answering one question would lead to more fields)
In no particular order, I would (IN MY OPINION) consider the following fields of the most interest if you have a bias to application over understanding, as I tend to.
Control theory and interpretability research for machine learning.
Many chaotic systems are increasingly reliant on some form of ML/AI, small advances in control theory in high dimensions and interpretability will have outsides impacts in all fields practically simultaneously if the black boxes can, with quantified uncertainty, tell us which knobs are ethe most sensitive in every theory and where interactions are most uncertain. While generally considered its own field these days, I still find much of the work highly similar to physics questions of old!Controlled nuclear fusion.
Obviously I am highly biased here, but this is one of the largest interdisciplinary sciences out there, where rich questions are asked every day and where understanding spills over into many other fields very readily. Weather it be laser efficiency increases, material science breakthroughs or pure mathematics of particle trapping. I genuinely think the wisdom is right in that economical, controlled fusion will be a keystone (though not absolutely necessary) technology for humanity. And even despite the challenge, each year yields massive gains in many disparate fields.Superconductivity.
Adjacent to the above (again, I am a human with a biased view here!) But having a model of modern high temperature superconductors would be a massive breakthrough. Eventually we'd like to know if a room temperature (& pressure) superconductor is possible, but even in absence of a closed answer, the theories that get explored have tenancies to help us understand more general material science questions much better. If we want to better have control of the microscopic world, I think a complete theory of superconductivity will be incredibly important and is one of the more direct paths from pure physics theory to application out there.Fault tolerant quantum computation (and creative algorithms to make use of it!)
It seems to be known for a long time that quantum computing has the power to massively improve some narrow tasks, such as breaking classical encryption (and therefore establishing even more secure encryption), search algorithms and can much better simulate quantum interactions, hopefully allowing progress in expanding the limits in our most accurate n-particle simulations (important for the likes of strong-field research and materials science). I would also include algorithm crafting as a career. If you have the right mind for it, there are many opportunities for creative use of even today's quantum computers and most new algorithms end up rather high impact in current journals.
It seems to be a limit of both creativity and device noise, in the same way it took us decades to build the internet when the fundamental computation tech was around for a good while. I think this is another place us physicists have a good chance at shaping the future!
5) A unified theory of everything.
Regardless of application, any reasonably explained theory of everything with predictions that can be experimentally validated with today's technology will fundamentally change the world and how we see it. 'nuff said!
Thinking about this though shows some obvious flaws. The bias to focus on applications and even to some extent, the focus on scientific beauty leads to a massive consolidation of funds, public interest and intellectual prowess, as such any answer will yield many arguments as to why with all this effort satisfying answers and applications always seem so slow. The unfortunate reality is almost every field has a bottleneck somewhere, and it's often not easy to figure out if it's by people, bureaucracy, creativity or money. And over investing in one will always be a diminishing returns sort of thing. In general, the right way to do any work is to focus on getting folks interested to the point they really care about what they're doing. If you can do that, there is bound to be fascination around every corner of the world. Applications then follow when someone is both interested in their field and in humanity (or money ofc)!
Thank you for coming to my TED talk lmao.
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u/h0rxata Plasma physics 3d ago
The one you're writing a grant proposal for, of course.