A common trope in contemporary science fiction is a small team in a lab somewhere (be it academia, industry, or just a hobbyist in a basement) fiddling around and discovering some new science - usually, some way of travelling to other universes or something (and then a whole load of plot unfolds as they accidentally unleash some terrible evil or whatever).
But... that kind of thing *just doesn't happen* any more. Sure, back in the 1600s, you might sit in a lab and [discover electricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gilbert_(astronomer)); back then, many of the fundamental forces that bind the Universe together were ripe for the discovering. As the centuries passed, the easy stuff was cleaned up bit by bit; in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory cleared up the last mysteries that were easily recreated on a hobbyist budget. There was some fun to be had in nuclear physics, which could be experimented with if you had institutional-level funds to build particle accelerators and atomic piles; but since then, all the really cool peeling-back-the-mysteries physics requires [vast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider) [financial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector) [resources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Probe_B).
What, then, for the nerd in a basement? Not only is exciting physics beyond their grasp, but the escapism of science fiction is dulled by the difficulty of suspending disbelief when our plucky heroes rewire a microwave oven to generate a disruption field that prevents the formation of a super-wormhole to [R'lyeh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%27lyeh). There's no shortage of fun things that can be built to demonstrate *known* physics, such as a [desktop fusion reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor); but that's just an engineering challenge. There's no new science. Wikipedia's excellent [List of unsolved problems in physics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics) is sadly short of things that can be explored from one's bedroom; they're mostly highly theoretical problems, for a start. Perhaps a better-funded amateur could tinker with [high-temperature superconductors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity), but the others on that list seem to either require vast machinery, or just pondering mathematical solutions to problems...
Thu 4th Jan 2018 1:52 am 
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By John Cowan, Thu 4th Jan 2018 @ 2:58 am
IIUC there is still a lot of solid-state physics left to figure out, and it's not even on the Arxiv.