JWST is an exception to my statement. Large Hadron Collider is only serving to confirm what is already "known", and improving the accuracy of existing models. It's not a new field, they aren't creating new elements or discovering new particles since the Higgs boson, and that was already effectively known.

There are still a lot of unknowns in high energy physics, but few projects related to that research. With enough energy, we could separate elements from trash, to recycle perfectly with something like magnetic resonance. But it's not cost effective because of the energy involved. Nobody is looking at it.

Nobody is looking at the deep sea except as a rich person's hobby. We aren't devoting a lot of effort to understand how some animals perceive things we cannot. Every time we do, it becomes news and people think it's some kind of indication we know a lot about it. We really don't, and we are losing species faster than we can study them.

We can print vaccines now, but this was only funded because it was a necessity. Now that covid is effectively solved it's not cost effective to lose your lifetime medicine revenue to actually solve long term illnesses. So it doesn't get funded.

Material properties aren't being researched much. For instance there was talk of holographic storage in crystals for a while but it never became a product because small improvements in current tech was easier to sustain.

Also where the hell is my flying car? We haven't even bent space yet. We aren't getting FTL before we do the fundamental research on that.