"This won't hurt a bit..."

Yes, any developments that sound promising are always going to be available several years down the road. And in most cases we never hear about them again.

I personally am extremely disappointed with the rate of scientific and technological advances over the last hundred or so years. We've had things like the internet, mobile phones, electronic cameras etc, but these have all been incremental innovations based on 19th century discoveries and inventions. There have been no fundamental breakthroughs in over 100 years. We still don't have antigravity cars, or teleportation, or robots that can do the housework. In the medical field, there's still no cure for cancer. Or even for the common cold. There has been nothing in the last 100 years to equal inventions like the telephone, moving pictures, radio, the combustion engine, airplanes etc. These inventions were miraculous in their day. Nowadays science is all about improving on existing technology - making smarter phones, smaller computers, safer planes or whatever. But there's no genuinely new technology.

And on the subject of dentistry, I remember going to see a dentist in London around 1985 to have a filling and he told me that it would probably be the last filling I'd ever need because dental technology was progressing at such a rapid pace. "Five years from now," he said, "we'll have dentistry without needles, and if someone loses a tooth they'll be able to regrow it."

Then you don't know what is : )

Exactly what I meant, Raybar. Mobile phones use advanced technology, but they still work on a principle discovered in the 19th century. We modify and improve existing inventions now, instead of discovering new principles.

I think the reason for this goes back to Thomas Edison and his Menlo Park laboratory, the world's first research and development facility. From then on, the emphasis was on development rather than discovery - ie, developing technologies that had a marketable end-product.

Previously, scientific discoveries were largely made by maverick scientists working on their own, driven by curiosity and, in most cases, a desire to help mankind and contribute to the sum of human knowledge.

Today - from Manlo Park on, in fact - research and development have been combined in a commercial concern, and science has become a career rather than a vocation. The best scientific minds are tasked with developing and improving existing technologies, when, arguably, they should be working independently to break new ground or at least find a cure for cancer.

Edison's idea was to accelerate scientific development and convert discoveries into machines and gadgets that people would buy. But the advent of R&D was also the death knell for independent scientific exploration.

I suppose it all depends on how you want to look at it and where you want to draw your lines.

(using loose language here ---)

Newton's work changed everything -- a fundamental advance in understanding forces, motion, gravity, the solar system

Faraday's work, put into mathematical form by Maxwell, changed everything -- a fundamental advance that made the entire electrical industry possible.

Einstein's work changed everything -- a fundamental advance in understanding space, time, gravity

Of course, each of them built on what came before, as do we all. But these (along with many others) were the critical insights that helped define our theories.