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This sounds implausible. As the saying goes, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead".
As an example of a rather successful government conspiracy, consider the NSA spying program. Pre-Snowden, there were certainly credible rumors that the big ISPs passed their cables through a government-controlled room. It would take an especially naive person to say "Surely the US government would not spy on its citizens." Internet veterans will remember the crypto wars, the US gov decision to classify PGP as munitions for the purpose of export restrictions and the attempts of the NSA to push broken crypto on the people. The thing which Snowden delivered was rather substantial evidence regarding the specifics -- which was admittedly a bit worse than I would have estimated. But the fact that state actors had the tech, the money and the incentive to spy on people was plain as day even before that.
Now you claim that the US government decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain (but bizarrely only after the Teller-Ulam design became public knowledge). Consider what it would imply. A cabal of Nobel laureates sitting in some smoky room in their anti-grav chairs having a meeting to decide what the exact mass of the Higgs particles which will be "discovered" at CERN should be. Of course, CERN is international, and over the decades, a lot of countries who were antagonistic to the US (i.e. the USSR or China) have had their own "fundamental physics" research programs. Unless the first secret discovery was a particle which makes it trivial to change the outcome of any physics experiment on Earth (in which case why keep pretending to have a cold war), the US would have had to have the convince at least some senior physicists in these countries to keep their mouths shut. Now if I were a senior researcher in the USSR, no amount of Nobels would convince me it would be a good idea to deceive the party leadership about the nature of reality as related to the feasibility of new weapons. Or would the Soviets have been in on it, too?
Also, there have been some areas of applied research where the US has allowed and indeed lead tremendous progress over the last few decades. Modern electronics and computers certainly seem to make physics research of all kinds so much easier. "They" must really feel secure in their absolute superiority to allow such tools in Muggle hands. If I was trying to keep fundamental physics secret, I would certainly not allow society to develop into an information society with more and more physics graduates poking at things.
I can see a state government keeping some particular design a secret (e.g. "You can ignite fusion bombs through fission bombs in precisely that way"), but not the basics ("Fusion exists. The sun is powered by fusion. Some people have been wondering if the power of fusion can somehow be harnessed by mankind.")
I thought I was pretty clear that I’m speculating - not claiming claiming anything. But address some of your points.
Secrets. There is no shortage of people out there giving interviews, claiming to be part of programs, publishing book, patents etc. These people are generally ignored, mocked, or written off as cranks no better than some skitzo in his basement. The political economy of academia makes dissent from the party line unthinkable. And for what? It’s not unreasonable to think that some step function change in our understanding of physics could be legitimate threat to humanity.
Ridicule. The second part of your reply is building a strawman of my alleged claim and then mocking it. At its most basic level, I’m saying that that the USG, having just unlocked nuclear weapons through physics, decided it was best to have a black fundamental physics program and made advances over the last 70 years. It would almost be irresponsible for them to have not done something like this. If I had to guess, I’d guess that they made progress manipulating another fundamental force - gravity. There appears to have been at least a lot of talk about that in public before everything and everyone involved vanished and mainstream physics focused string theory. No time travel or antigrav chairs needed. Just a relatively small group of scientists, in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, already nearly merged into the MIC, deciding that this is the most responsible path for physics.
It seems plausible that the USSR and China came to similar conclusions either independently or loosely connected. We seemed to be able to understand the importance of a hotline or other space research despite hostilities. Given the stakes involved, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to me to think that everyone agrees to not make this public. Of course these other programs would likely be far behind the US. In fact I’ve heard speculation that the US governments abrupt change in UAP policy in the last 10 years could be a result of these other programs having finally caught up with us.
Again. None of this sounds even remotely ridiculous to me. Yet people get their backs up on even the most mild version of this story. Why is that?
As I said, the whole topic is a lot of fun. There is so much interesting stuff out there. And it’s easier than ever to find.
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