Kind of, as you say it is time-consuming to keep up. A bigger problem is that it's not obvious what the impact of many discoveries would be on daily life; physics sometimes seems to have been stuck in an era of diminishing returns after important breakthroughs that led to a short era of rapid innovation - sort of how nuclear fusion has been 20 years away my whole life.
I've often felt part of the problem here is the relative decrease of manned missions in space, which are not the best bang for the buck in scientific terms, but at one time created a widespread of view of 'humanity's future in space' that provided the motivation for and wide public interest in many scientific endeavors.
Nowadays, there's a widespread feeling that planet earth has got very crowded and there aren't as many opportunities for big new discoveries (the sort that can be appreciated by anyone without specialist education/training), that the long-term viability of our habitat is Not Great, and that the prospect of space exploration is too remote and costly to have any impact on the lives of ordinary people, but is limited to a microscopic scientific or financial elite.
Of course, this is somewhat irrational; as a society we've chosen to have ubiquitous worldwide real-time communications devices that would have once seemed limited to star Trek. Computing has made big science small enough to fit in our pocket and allowed anyone who is really interested to be a software maven. But it's not as spectacular as the future anticipated a few decades ago.
I've often felt part of the problem here is the relative decrease of manned missions in space, which are not the best bang for the buck in scientific terms, but at one time created a widespread of view of 'humanity's future in space' that provided the motivation for and wide public interest in many scientific endeavors.
Nowadays, there's a widespread feeling that planet earth has got very crowded and there aren't as many opportunities for big new discoveries (the sort that can be appreciated by anyone without specialist education/training), that the long-term viability of our habitat is Not Great, and that the prospect of space exploration is too remote and costly to have any impact on the lives of ordinary people, but is limited to a microscopic scientific or financial elite.
Of course, this is somewhat irrational; as a society we've chosen to have ubiquitous worldwide real-time communications devices that would have once seemed limited to star Trek. Computing has made big science small enough to fit in our pocket and allowed anyone who is really interested to be a software maven. But it's not as spectacular as the future anticipated a few decades ago.