Every once in a while I get the feeling that the greatest discoveries are still ahead and these next few decades might be the real "golden age of science". The "individual genius" phase is just behind us and the "collaborative brilliance" phase is just beginning.
It is possible that Gravity as we know it is an illusion. For example, the Newtonian take on Gravity was that it was a force. That according to Einstein was illusory, Gravity was really a geometric manifestation due to the curvature of
space-time. With that take Gravity as we know it is different from the Gravity as was once known. However the Newtonian view that Gravity is a force can and still does facilitate useful everyday computations.
The go to illusion when we think of illusions is the mirage, you can see as water complete with the wavy nature of water and if you had no way of getting closer to inspect it, it might as well be the real thing. Depending on your philosophical take either it is always an illusion, or it becomes an illusion when you find out that it is not water.
A note of agreement with what seems like your main query, we might as well drop the word illusion when it comes to the physical description of the universe. Any framework of description is full of illusions that may never be proven otherwise.
I took QFT some years back and it also went over my head. There is still that mental gap of where the only way you can think about time is via time-(in)dependent wave function.
We experience gravity as a force - we can measure it with devices designed to measure forces. It's not an illusion. However, the model of gravity as a force between massive objects does not capture certain aspects of gravity - it's an incomplete model.
That doesn't actually mean that gravity is "really a geometric manifestation due to the curvature of space-time". Gravity appears to behave that way, but what do you mean by "really" in that sentence? What we can say with confidence is that the spacetime curvature model is a more precise and complete model of gravity than the mass/force model.
Perhaps if we figure out how to unify quantum phenomena with gravitation, we'll find a different model for gravity in that context. Will you then say that gravity wasn't "really" spacetime curvature? That wouldn't make sense, because all that will have changed is that we would have another model for interpreting and understanding gravity.
When people say gravity is an "illusion" or that forces are "fictitious", what they're really getting at is that these observed phenomena are not fundamental - that they're consequences of some underlying phenomena. But they're real consequences, not illusory or fictitious.
(Of course "fictitious" is a technical term used in physics, but it doesn't mean "does not exist in reality" but rather means something more like "is not fundamental".)
>I took QFT some years back and it also went over my head. There is still that mental gap of where the only way you can think about time is via time-(in)dependent wave function.
Total bullshit. The wave function is time dependent.
Given psi(x, t), if the relation between x and t is not non- linear. Then you can have a time-independent Schrodinger equation with a time-independent wave-function i.e psi(x).
However, you do not need start with a time dependent wave function to justify the time-independent wave function.
I always think of "golden ages" as arising naturally from a random distribution of "big breakthroughs" and similar. It's not unlikely that you'd get some clumps of many breakthroughs followed by time with very few breakthroughs. And we call these clumps "golden ages." And of course, the fact that they're not independent events, but that one breakthrough might precipitate another, just reinforces this.
So I don't think "golden ages" are going away any time soon.
To expand on what Osmium said, a "golden age" is more like a "goldrush age": A big breakthrough opens up a new conceptual frontier, and the golden age is scientists rushing in to homestead and start mining the new landscape.
This isn't to say that all progress is done in goldrushes, but the most basic and, therefore, best-known work of a given field will be done in that period.
There's no continuum because some things are harder, others are easy.
Computers have evolved pretty much "continually" since the personal computer era, but they took some time to be invented.
Quantum mechanics evolved "quickly" once we found out there was such a thing as quantum mechanics, up until them it was a lot of "banging heads" and freewheeling.
Not to mention delays because of other constraints: wars, political instabilities, etc
