Just discovered these, and so far bought and worked my way through ‘Wingless Flight – the lifting body story’ and ‘Facing the Heat Barrier:
A History of Hypersonics’.
Both are, in my view, superb. I often find myself drawn to biographies by pilots from the 40s to the 60s. These books concentrate less on derring-do and more on the engineering teams and challenges involved. Written for nerds by nerds; readable but with a reasonable level of technical detail. Perhaps it’s a rosy view, but they seemed golden days full of fundamental technical challenges to solve, and the money to pay for them. Days when a person working in a small team might hope to build a small but recognisable piece of the future. Days when people took responsibility, rather than committees. Days when you could zoom and boom without filling out tickbox forms in triplicate.
In the sciences there’s a view that the golden ages might be drawing to a close. Nobel prize winners are getting ever older, and they work for longer in larger teams before being awarded their prizes. The low-hanging fruit has been taken, and rather than discovering DNA, you get a Nobel for discovering an obscure but important gene. It’s a view echoed by ‘ignition’ – an autobiography of a rocket-fuel chemist who concludes by observing that the current generation of rocket fuels are probably as good as chemistry permits. Perhaps we’re just colouring in the details now, the fundamentals are reasonably well understood and there’s little new to be discovered.
But perhaps technology isn’t like this. Maybe in 30 years I’ll settle down to read “the SpaceX story: perfecting precision automated landing” or in 50 years “Living off asteroids; the early days”. In fact, I feel more optimistic about this now than I have since the 1980s. In the meanwhile, I’ve just bought ‘Black Magic and Gremlins: Analog Flight Simulations at NASA’s Flight Research Center’ – a history of early flight simulators.
Was it Kelvin who suggested everything in physics had been discovered? Before electromagnetic waves, radioactivity, etc. He was eminent enough to give his name to a temperature scale. 
I think the next breakthrough in physics – if it comes – will be a discovery of a new way of interacting with gravity. The only currently known way is by manipulating impractically large masses.
Otherwise, yeah, the low hanging fruit is all gone.
Yes, why does gravity occur?… Its not obvious to me why objects having mass would be attracted to each other.
Also, if you move a wire through a magnetic field it generates a voltage along the wire… Why do the electrons decide they should move?
Finally, how does a lost dog find its way home from hundreds of miles away, as they occasionally do?
That’s three problems to start with, eh?
If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend reading Digital Apollo by David Mindell – history of automation in the Apollo flight decks and the guidance computer.
Yes – and also How Apollo Flew to the Moon
Very interesting stuff.
