I still believe it’s possible and even likely that there are aspects of our universe that are totally undiscovered, much like radio was a thing no one knew about until it was discovered. It seems reasonable to me that we might discover ways to create gravity on demand, or to contort spacetime in other ways using electrical devices. Any of this would upend our understanding of physics to a large degree. But nothing will falsify existing observations - apples will always fall from apple trees. That doesn’t mean there can’t be more out there.
The less you know, the more likely all those things seem. People who know nothing about chemistry believe you can make a car that uses water or air as fuel (but big oil is suppressing it). Children wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn that momentum was not conserved in space or in nuclear reactions or in aeroplanes because they didn't even know it was supposed to be conserved in the first place or that those things were known to follow the same laws as their toys.
So I think being skeptical of accepted physics in any specific way isn't something a layman has much business doing. Of course there will be things we think we know that turn out to be wrong, but a layman can see such things everywhere, not just the places they will actually appear.
Eh, I don’t think it’s just about ignorance. I had a fantastic science teacher for chemistry and physics in high school, then took another few quarters of chemistry and physics in college, and I am fascinated by cosmology today. I’ve read Steven Hawking and I love lectures by Lawrence Krauss. I’ve watched probably every Feynman lecture on YouTube. I’m still perhaps a lay person (I am an engineer by trade), but I DO have an understanding of physics and chemistry. I don’t think there’s science people know that they’re keeping from us. I just think it’s naive to think we’ve discovered almost everything there is to know about the universe. I’m not trying to build a straw man, but I’m saying either there’s “just a little bit more” to know or there’s a whole lot. I’m inclined to believe there’s a whole lot left to discover when it comes to things that will have a big impact on our world.
And to be clear, I’m not being skeptical of accepted physics. When radio was discovered it didn’t change the accepted body of knowledge so much as it added new things we could do.
I don't have knowledge about this phenomenon specifically, so you might be right that even an educated person would see hope, but I suspect it's more like whatshisface's two comments here which I think are very insightful:
We would expect new discoveries to be outside the range of what we've already tested, not randomly in the middle of it. For example, special relativity becomes significant at high speeds that nobody had ever studied before, not at some odd speed between a horse and a train.
But if you didn't know what has already been tested, you wouldn't know where "outside" is. The fact that the original device used a magnetron from a microwave oven suggests it was well within what we've already studied. Maybe the novel aspect is the very tiny effect which nobody measured accurately enough to notice before.
The problem with this view is, it ignores that some of what we learn are very strong constraints, such as conservation laws and how they're connected to physical symmetries of systems.
Strictly speaking, all we know boils down to probabilistic statements. So yes, in some absolute sense, we might discover we're all totally wrong about something really fundamental. But we also know the bound on that probability is very, very, very, very, low.
