There’s a bias in SF and its brethren such as alternate history to do world building around the big ass stuff; wars, revolutions, catastrophes. Or, for the sciencey mindset, the big ass discoveries that change our understanding of cosmology or fundamental physics, or some sort of massive engineering or computing breakthrough that has us uploading ourselves into the singularity overnight. All well and good. But it’s overlooking the less flashy and more pervasive influence of the small. It’s not the technology of the cell phone that changed the world, it was the idea of it. More than simply the internal combustion engine, it was the idea of mass production that altered everything. Most of the nature of Web 2.0 has little to do with the tech of the internet, but in how it is used.
Of course the latter type of change is harder to write about. But small incremental shifts in sciences that we thought were pretty much settled will probably have way more impact on daily life than the detection of the Higgs Boson.
Via Io9 I read about some breakthroughs in fluid mechanics and the mathematical modeling of turbulence. You may stifle a yawn, but understanding this will have impact for just about every single thing we make that moves; cars, aircraft, boats, wind turbines, jet engines. In a few years our design process may involve specifying the parameters of a vehicle, and having a computer mathematically model the body for us. (Rather than having a human come up with the initial design then testing it.)
We may have some funky looking planes in our future that use a lot less fuel.