Okay, but pedantry aside, the 20th century kicked the 21st century's ass when it comes to scientific discovery. Some stuff discovered between 1900 and 1920:

- Relativity

- Atomic nuclei

- Darwinian modern synthesis

On the technological application side, there was the airplane and mass production of cars, plus the growth of telephony and radio.

In the 21st century we have:

- found a bunch of extra solar planets but the work really started in the 90s, lol

On the application side, we have the cellphone/smartphone revolution and continued penetration of the internet, plus consumer EVs and solar panels. Not nothing, but the smartphone is the biggest change to daily life. Everything else is more just refinement of what came before.

I can't really think of other things that are profound scientific discoveries versus technical applications or filling in of minute details. We're just clearly in the far side of the S curve now, and the 20th century was the rollercoaster.

>In the 21st century we have:

In much the same way that much of 2020's progress was actually started from the 20th century, much of e.g. the year 2060's progress will be stuff actually started from 2020. We likely systemically underestimate the use of today's discoveries simply since the big stuff mostly isn't useful yet.

I agree that we still don't totally know what happened 2000–2020, but e.g. the Eddington eclipse proof of relativity was 1919 and Einstein became an international celebrity around then.

I think I am underrated some math discoveries since it's not an area I follow, e.g. the Poincaré conjecture proof is probably a big deal. On the other hand, when did Poincaré make his conjecture? 1900. So in a certain sense, we are backfilling a known gap.

I feel like it was greatly due to the WWII. Those and so many other discoveries were the direct result of programs like project manhattan. Maybe the human species really needs to be pushed to extinction to further tξhe human enterprise or maybe it was just the crazy funding similar to bell labs.

My comparison period was 1900 to 1920.

Besides that, much academic work has to be done before the industry can use those ideas to achieve said technological advances.

I'd just expect an author to be precise when writing something that will be read by thousands of people, as opposing to just spitting out some flowery language.