I think this becomes even clearer if you look at what the major recent experimental results in physics are.
The two that come to mind are gravitational waves and the Higgs Boson.
Gravitational waves were observed by LIGO and Virgo. These observatories were built in 1993/1994, but did not observe a gravitational wave until 2015 (many have been observed since then).
VIRGO costs ~10mil Euro/year to operate and is staffed by over 300 people.
LIGO had an initial budget of $395 million in 1994, with a $200million overhaul in 2015.
The Higgs Boson was detected using the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC began in 1995, and would not discover the Higgs until 2012. The LHC had a construction cost of $4.4 billion, with an annual operating budget of $1billion.
Most of the discoveries of the 20th centuary did not require anywhere near this scale of experiment. There is still some room to grow here (more powerful colliders and more sensitivy gravitational observatories are being planned), but fundamental physisics seems to be fast approaching the limits of our current engineering capabilities; and may need to enter a quite period while it waits for the more applied sciences to catch up. Or, worse, the laws of physicis end up being such that the "next step" of experiments is simply outside the range of what we could conceivably build.
The two that come to mind are gravitational waves and the Higgs Boson.
Gravitational waves were observed by LIGO and Virgo. These observatories were built in 1993/1994, but did not observe a gravitational wave until 2015 (many have been observed since then).
VIRGO costs ~10mil Euro/year to operate and is staffed by over 300 people.
LIGO had an initial budget of $395 million in 1994, with a $200million overhaul in 2015.
The Higgs Boson was detected using the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC began in 1995, and would not discover the Higgs until 2012. The LHC had a construction cost of $4.4 billion, with an annual operating budget of $1billion.
Most of the discoveries of the 20th centuary did not require anywhere near this scale of experiment. There is still some room to grow here (more powerful colliders and more sensitivy gravitational observatories are being planned), but fundamental physisics seems to be fast approaching the limits of our current engineering capabilities; and may need to enter a quite period while it waits for the more applied sciences to catch up. Or, worse, the laws of physicis end up being such that the "next step" of experiments is simply outside the range of what we could conceivably build.