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Asked by anon-351151 on 8 Mar 2023.
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Jonathan Edward Davies answered on 8 Mar 2023:
Good one! With the promise of much more data over the next 10 years, there will be lots of opportunities to make our measurements more and more precise and hopefully find some where we see definite disagreements with our predictions so we work towards a new theory that can describe things better e.g. explaining why we live in a universe with lots of matter and not very much antimatter, explaining dark matter, including gravity in our theory. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee of anything so the best we can do is take the data and look out for anything that looks odd. We will also only get smarter in terms of how we filter through our data to find the interesting stuff, maybe doing a lot with machine learning or similar techniques.
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Michael Doser answered on 21 Mar 2023:
Progress itself can’t be predicted with certainty, since one of the main motivations is to discover something unexpected (and revolutionary, hopefully). However, you can get a pretty good idea of where you should head (difficult problems on the verge of being answerable, questions living in an interdisciplinary area, opportunities that technologies just being worked on can open up), and what you might find there (the expected but unexplored, obviously, sometimes the hoped-for that couldn’t be explored before and that now becomes accessible). In my field, antimatter physics and quantum sensing, in the next decade, there’s the potential to find violations of fundamental symmetries, discover the nature of dark matter, discover a flaw in our understanding of gravity, and build new types of qubits for quantum computers.
I can predict with some certainty that we will be able to build the systems with which these questions can be asked. I can’t predict if any of those discoveries will be made (since they don’t fit into our known framework). I can predit that we’ll have lots of fun searching. And I can predict that if we don’t try, we’ll regret it 😉
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