There are stories that famous physicists made predictions of a list of problems; problems that the future generation of physicists will be busy with or revolutionize the future of physics in the upcoming years. Any idea?
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4$\begingroup$ See List of unsolved problems in physics. But what is predicted does not revolutionize, and what revolutionizes can not be predicted. $\endgroup$– ConifoldCommented Aug 12, 2020 at 5:28
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$\begingroup$ I found this physics.rutgers.edu/colloq/ginzburg.pdf $\endgroup$– SolidificationCommented Aug 12, 2020 at 8:49
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2$\begingroup$ As per @Conifold's pithy maxim, if you transposed your question back by 130 years, you'd see how pointless it would have been, then... $\endgroup$– Cosmas ZachosCommented Aug 12, 2020 at 14:22
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Atomic theory was predicted 2,500 years ago by Democritus and Leucippus, and it did revolutionise physics once that scale could be probed. In fact, its revolutionary potential was such that Feynman wrote in his lectures that if all scientific knowledge was forgotten, and one sentence was to be preserved for future generations, then he would pick 'all things are made up of atoms.' Actually, this did occur but we didn't have just a single sentence turn up in the early modern period, but a whole book - Lucretious's On the Nature of Things. Not only did it describe atoms, it also described what was later taken to be one of the irrefutable proofs of atoms - Brownian motion with essentially the same explanation!
The critique of atomic theory was also done 2,500 years ago by Aristotle. This particular revolution is still ongoing as people are still struggling to come to terms with what is known as wave-particle duality. In other words, it revolutionised our understanding of what constitutes being: atoms are not permanent being-like entities but are also involved in becoming.
The main critique of Newtonian Gravity was that it acted at a distance with no intervening mechanism. When this was solved by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, it revolutionised our ideas of space and time. This geometric picture of space and time was later revolutionised our understanding of classical field theories so they too became geometric.
Still, one might say that this was all predicted by Plato, who was channeling the Pythagoreans, when he suggested that physical nature at bottom was geometry, and geometry was the visible manifestation of necessity in nature.
The main prediction for revolutionary physics in the future is Quantum Gravity with a lot of physicists in search for it with maybe half a dozen major programmes from LQG, causal dynamical triangulations, string theory, asymptotic safety and so on.
On a more applied level, a global infrastructure of renewable energy will undoubtably revolutionise the global economy once all the problems with generation, storage, transmission and manufacturing have been sorted out. Especially when one realises how much of geo-politics is predicated on securing energy supplies, which in today's world, still means fossil fuels.
