Retours vers le passé en attendant la prochaine percée expérimentale ...

 ... qui fera avancer la théorie [des cordes], {de la gravitation quantique à boucle} (ou une autre) 

One often hears that the present day situation in fundamental physics (string theory, loop gravity) has some similarity with the early years of quantum theory, before the great breakthrough – mostly by a young generation – in 1925-26. I find this analogy totally wrong. Without the precision experiments by the Berlin group (Kurlbaum, Rubens, etc.) and the difficult measurements of the specific heat of molecular hydrogen and other diatomic gases at low temperatures, that demonstrated the freezing out of the rotational degrees of freedom, as well as the low temperature measurements of the specific heat of solids by Nernst, Lindemann and others, it is hard to imagine that quantum theory could have been developed. This is, of course, not new, but it may not be inappropriate to be recalled in an article ...”

Norbert Straumann, On the first Solvay Congress in 1911, 10/2011