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Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?
An anonymous reader writes "In decades and centuries past, scientific genius was easy to quantify. Those scientists who were able to throw off the yoke of established knowledge and break new ground on their own are revered and respected. But as humanity, as a species, has gotten better at science, and the basics of most fields have been refined over and over, it's become much harder for any one scientist to make a mark on the field. There's still plenty we don't know, but so much of it is highly specialized that many breakthroughs are understood by only a handful. Even now, the latest generation is more likely to be familiar with the great popularizers of science, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Carl Sagan, than of the researchers at the forefront of any particular field. "...most scientific fields aren't in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn's classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways." Will we ever again see a scientist get recognition like Einstein did?"
Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?
No.
NO
New improvements in science and technology have given scientists tools to better explore and understand our world. The era of ground breaking science is not over. It is always accelerating.
Flying Cars
Teleportation
Holodeck
Perpetual Motion Machine
No
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
You dare mention a man that was partly responsible for downgrading Pluto? Shame!
Until Einstein, Planck, Bohr, and the quantum mechanics scientists came along and ushered in a new golden age. Before that, the field was considered about 98 percent solved.
Well, this article is right. And will remain right, until the next big breakthrough.
...
At which point, it'll probably be irrelevant, so
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
Isn't this like saying we now know everything major, so only minor things are left to discover.
Seems a bit dubious since there are massive voids in our scientific knowledge in many fields.
And, didn't we just find a Higgs Boson(s) recently?
The guy who came up with PCR while driving on the road to Santa Cruz California would make the question in the Title completely silly and irrelevant.
Is slashdot becoming like yahoo or something? Snazzy titles to suck people like me in, but once I consider what the title is saying, it is really just absurd.
There was just a question the other day asking if we were past the age of invention. I believe one of the tags on it was "retarded."
The next scientists and the next breakthroughs will be in the softer sciences, biotechnology and social sciences. How to structure a society in a world were "work" is increasingly meaningless (both physically as machines can do more and more, and morally as we desperately try to "create" new jobs to cling to the old workweek model). How to understand biology and stop aging.
I doubt it because look at the achievements of people like Craig Venter. The importance of his work is still largely unrecognized, as suggested by the fact that he still hasn't received the Nobel prize (and I firmly believe he deserves it). It could be that the impact of their work is still too fresh to be assessed. There are still lots of groundbreaking scientific discoveries waiting out there, like room-temperature superconductors, the cure to cancer, teleportation, tractor beams... Maybe the question will be deemed silly in 50 years. Who knows?
I'm pretty sure whoever figures that one out will be famous.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Is groundbreaking science over? No, not remotely. Is the era where groundbreaking science is publicized and sort of vaguely understood by a lot of non-scientists over? Probably not, but that's at least closer to the truth.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Ask people who are famous scientists, and you'll get Einstein, Newton, and maybe a few modern ones like Watson and Crick, or Stephen Hawking (who incidentally probably IS more famous than any of those listed in the summary, and also has been at the forefront of his field).
So you have two big ones separated by a few centuries, then a scattering of scientists who are in the modern era. Going by that timeframe, we're highly likely to see groundbreaking research by a new famous scientist in the next 300 years.
Also, Edison was a GREAT scientist (j/k, j/k, have mercy, mods!)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The greatest scientists of our generation will not be truly known until many years from now, when we can look back on the contributions with a greater understanding of the truth.
In the late 1990's someone proclaimed that there was nothing more to invent, and he was proven to be very very wrong ...
Now someone is trying the same thing, again, while tweaking the wording a little bit, by adding "groundbreaking" in the proclamation
It gonna be as wrong as that guy in the late 1990's.
Science progresses on.
Groundbreaking or not, that's not the issue.
For new breakthrough in science always "stand" on the shoulders of all the previous scientific findings
Furthermore, how do you define "groundbreaking" ?
Does one actually have to "break some ground" to be groundbreaking ?
How about some new ideas being applied to older subjects, which yield new findings ?
Would that be counted as "groundbreaking" ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There IS ground breaking science. Dark matter, dark energy, experimental measurements of cosmological inflation: our picture of the large scale structure of the universe has changed dramatically. Higgs bosons, neutrino mass: our picture of the microscopic structure of the universe has changed. We've found hundreds of extra-solar planets. We've built giant particle accelerators and telescopes, huge computers and data networks, peta-watt and X-ray lasers. We've sequenced the DNA of many creatures, including some that are extinct - and which we may bring back.We have pictures from the surface of a moon of Saturn, and an car driving around Mars.
Starting next year: Downgrade six planets illegally and you'll get booted off the Internets.
Furthermore, Yes, Virginia, everything that can be invented already has. Close the patent office.
Dude, read a little and realize how dumb what you just submitted is.
But you will.
- John Titor
Only if ideas can be patented, in which case, yeah, we might expect science to grind to a halt.
Just Say No.
Gee, I thought 'anonymous' only hacked networks.
Who knew you also work on particle physics....
Einstein was famous because his discovered relativity. If he didn't discover it, someone else would have, and they would have been approximately as famous as Einstein.
There are lots of really famous scientists like bohr, heisenberg, feynman, etc. They did amazing groundbreaking work. And that wasn't even too long ago. Some science involves spending billions of dollars on particle accelerators to verify existing hypotheses, but it still takes visionaries (like Peter Higgs) to come up with the ideas worth building an LHC to verify.
To say that no one will ever be as famous as einstein, is to say that there isn't anything else out there that we could learn that would be as mind blowing as relativity. Maybe that's true, but I don't see any reason to believe it is true.
After Newton came up with his laws, I'm sure the scientists of the time felt they'd pretty much figured it out. Sure there was some details that needed filling in, but Newton had hit the nail on the head and it was just a matter of time before everything else fell into place with this new knowledge. Why would anything contradict these laws? They are so perfect!
Well it turns out they weren't so perfect afterall, and observations did contradict Newtons laws that they had to be wrong in some fundamental way. Nothing but a revolutionary theory was going to make sense of it.
We are already in a time when stuff doesn't make sense. Phase 1 complete. All we need is for someone to complete phase 2 and come up with a clean equation (or a crazy dirty one) that explains it all, and phase 3 build a really fucking expensive death ray type device to open a portal into another dimension to verify that it's right. What an exciting time we live in.
When you read about scientific history, it seems like discoveries come so fast because we get to skip all the boring parts. In the present it seems to go so slow because we can't fast forward. But in reality things are going so much faster now. Maybe the next great scientists will be an artificial intelligence that we create.
500 years ago: scientific research is done by aristocrats as a self-funded hobby, or sometimes by priests after the Catholic Church got over it's butthurt on heliocentrism. Printing is exorbitantly expensive and education for the general population. There might have been hundreds of Issac Newtons born in a generation, but they ended up working on farms or in the military, not going to an academy.
Now: research is directly sponsored by governments. You don't have to be in the priesthood or be the child of rich parents to go to secondary school anymore - though the latter certainly helps with admissions and student loans. The Mars Rovers were huge government funded, collaborative projects, not a hobby by Bill Gates. And of course the Internet allows sharing of data at a speed and volume that Newton never could have imagined.
You would hope the "anonymous reader" would have thought about this after a couple seconds, and is just posing the question for conversational purposes....
'Big Al' didn't get IP from the 'ergs from mass' thing.
All the low-hanging fruit -- i.e. discoveries -- have mostly been discovered and what remains requires the "big science" projects like CERN that involve hundreds or thousands of scientists. Or... today's scientists just don't measure up to the Einsteins, Bohrs, et al. (OK... I've got on my Nomex longjohns on... fire away.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
" Those scientists who were able to throw off the yoke of established knowledge and break new ground on their own are revered and respected."... many years later. Their contemporaries often criticized and ridiculed them, even threatening excommunication if they didn't recant.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Sure, Einstein was ground breaking, but apart from E=mc^2, how many people know what he did (or even what it means)? How many know of the photoelectric effect? Relativity and quantum mechanics gets thrown around a lot as buzzwords, but most people have no idea what they mean.
So you might consider that Einstein has become a great popularizers of science - unintentionally, but most people know that he was in a physicist, and don't really have a clue what he did.
You seem to want groundbreaking to mean both Famous and Important Contributions. But I'm not sure how long it took for Einstein to become a household name. And you also want it to be One man/woman. That might not be as realistic anymore. Because research in most areas requires lots of equipments and teams (except in a few areas - theoretical mathematics and physics come to mind). But just because it is a team, doesn't make it any less valuable.
In fact, I prefer teams and organizations get recognition. Students and the younger crowd have something concrete to work towards. Not "I want to be the next XYZ", but instead "I want to work at XYZ". They might have a hero-worship of the organization, but will still work hard towards something measurable.
Around turn of the last but one century (1900), the end of physics was in sight. Done it you know. It took a nobody who is not even got a tutorship in U and has to do a patent to break everything in one year. He even got a Nobel Price in QM which he did not believe! Since then, no one dare to say anything. What can be said now is that change is so inherent and everyone is finding their breakthrough that it is not aware of so many discovery and changes around us. Just like water to fish. Just 30 years ago, do you think you can have 42" colour TV in your pocket, now our HD resolution IPAD same as that -- if you hold your IPAD and sit in your sofa and check. It is effectively the same size! ... That is enable by a lot of material science breakthrough, ... It is just so many (but little or stable) that you are drown with discovery everyday.
Just now sure can a clerk somewhere can do what he did then. Have to give up a child and never found her again in his life.
Many seem to be declaring that a new breakthrough is right around the corner. But I suspect they don't realize how successful our current theories already are. In fundamental physics, we simply can't find anything that deviates from our current theories at scales smaller than a galaxy and at energies small enough to be relevant to anything except the big bang and future particle colliders. What would a breakthrough in fundamental physics look like? Maybe someone finds a supersymmetric particle that guides us to a theory uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics. Our understanding would advance, but what practical effect would it have? Our theories already predict the behavior of matter and energy at the scales relevant to human life in our corner of the galaxy very accurately. It would be at best a minor correction to precision measurements. (And eventually in thousands of years when humans start travelling across the galaxy there might be some practical relevance for understanding dark matter etc.) The important revolutions to come in science are not in fundamental physics. They are in learning how to apply the known laws of physics to the behavior of the human brain, the global climate, ecosystems on earth, etc. And these problems are much less amenable to solution by a single genius like Einstein. They are more likely to fall to large group efforts coupling massive computational resources with experiments and multi-scale theoretical models.
Let's take Stephen Hawking as an example. He is thought to be one of the biggest geniuses nowadays. But if you ask common public member, what did he discover, most people won't be able to say a single thing. He published many books for general public, which made him good PR, he is disabled, which is good for such image too. The media think, that he is current Albert Einstein and hence the general public does.
To be sure somebody doesn't take me wrong, I took S.H. just as an example, I'm not by any means questioning his work.
Answer any of the following and you too can win a Nobel prize...
1. What is a magnetic field?
2. What is a electric field?
3. What is gravity?
4. Do tachyons exist?
5. Does the Higgs Boson exist?
6. Does matter decay?
7. Is a magnetic field really a field or is it just another property of space-time?
8. In how any dimensions does the Universe or multiverse exist? (The basic question of string theory)
9. Can magnetic and electric fields be quantized or are they continuous?
10. Can time and space be quantized or is it continuous?
11. Why can't we all just get along?
12. Is the universe a giant predetermined simulation playing out or do we have free will.
We are a species that just recently wandered in off the Sahara. We know a lot about a little. Our knowledge is like Swiss cheese, full of holes, gaps, and inconsistencies. There are things we observe but can't explain and things we can explain but can't observe. Go watch this video from Fenyman...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI
The people you are thinking of are Lord Kelvin and Michelson. Michelson quoted lord Kelvin as saying all future science is in the 5th decimal place. But, as Michelson went on to explain, he didn't mean everthing left was about dotting i's and crossing t's. He meant it was unlikely that classica physics was profoundly wrong in the realms we observe and inhabit but there could be great physics out there. It just had to be lurking in the shadows-- out in the 5th decimal place. And sure enough it was. ANd still is. Just the other day someone measured the radius of a proton using muons instead of the usual electrons and it was wrong by 4%. That's absurdly huge. COuld be some new physcis is about to move into the light.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
All of it.
Some things never change. Stupid gimboids complaining that everything has been invented and lamenting that all the groundbreaking science has been done is probably one of the few immutable things one can count on (like taxes).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
That is all.
My how quickly we forget the insane fan fare that just months ago surrounded Peter Higgs. While I understand the sentiment of the article, there will simply always be individuals that make great strides and discoveries which then later garner main stream media attention, in spite of the growing fact that conglomerates and large teams at universities make discoveries rather than individuals... and why shouldn't it be this way?
Massive funding and teams of individuals can make progress at a greater rate than any individual could ever be expected to. There are simply too many nuances upon nuances in science now, to have them all be understood even by the greatest of geniuses.
This may however not hold true for theoretical science (i.e. theoretical physics)... which can largely still be worked on by individuals, owing largely to the fact that much of what they work on will never be supported or disproven in their life times, given out current lack of ability to research such things.
Again Peter Higgs is a perfect example.... His Higgs-Boson theory could NEVER have been proven (I know, I know never say proven) without the billions of dollars of funding provided to test his theories.
Some fields where there is growth and potential for breakthrough will include the field of statistics proper and fields that rely heavily on it. The revolution in information technology has enabled growth in the field of statistics because it has allowed the investigation of theoretical questions that could not be tested before cheap and powerful computational facility came before. CART and Random Forest algorithms, for example, were made possible by the IT revolution. Fields like genetics (obviously) and sociology and psychology (less obviously) will grow because of this.
Note that in these last two fields (sociology, psychology), there have in the last 100 years been no breakthroughs that are the equivalent of a heart-transplant or splitting the atom. So, there is indeed room for growth in these fields.
That said, along with information technology, fields in the humanistic sciences will still probably be constrained by the ability to reliably a) observe phenomena, and b) account for a vast number of hidden variables. So advances there will be the result of revolutions in ability to observe human phenomena.
I'd say that some actual scientists are just as well known:
Lawrence M. Krauss
Steven Hawkins
Richard Dawkins
Also I would point out that Neil deGrasse Tyson is a working scientist who does do real research, as was Carl Sagan
Yes we may be in the middle of a non revolutionary period in science but doesn't mean that a revolution isn't on its way. Heck You will find quite a few writers who would argue that quantum mechanics as it stands is in desperate need of another Einestine to come along and replace it with something more coherent. Its just that such that to do something that ground breaking you have to be born at the right place and at the right time. And that just does not happen that often.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, so how does gravity work again? We don't know Jack!
Until half of scientists are female, science remains fundamentally sexist.
Let's break some ground, and get more ladies in there.
Because #Fairness.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
In case no one has been paying attention, anything creative and truly original is being held back and/or suppressed. It's the same with music, movies and all other such things. Surely the whole world didn't suddenly lose its ability to create and wonder. No.
This is what happens when business gets behind everything. They require profits and success in a steady and predictable stream. The only way to deliver in that way is to only make incremental improvements and to remake everything over and over again.
Welcome to the Corporate Nations of Earth. How do yu like it so far?
My brain hurts just trying to parse what you said. I think it would be better if you put it in whatever your native language is and we let google translate it into English. It certainly couldn't be any worse.
For example, some people say physicist Ed Witten is greater than Einstein or Newton. In any case, there are probably more super geniuses working on science than ever. Maybe there are fewer breakthroughs from genius, precisely because science has become professionalized and there are already many geniuses working on the big problems. In such an environment, the huge breakthroughs and paradigm shifts just aren't left waiting around to be found.
I'm sure there will be breakthroughs and paradigm shifts in the future, it would be silly to argue otherwise. However, maybe science has become so advanced that even the great geniuses only make incremental advances.
In physics for example, the breakthrough wanting to happen is String Theory. Who is the man behind String Theory? Well, there isn't one man. String theory is hard. If it takes shape and takes hold, it won't be a "breakthrough." It will have been a long, hard slog with a tough problem that no single genius could solve.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
creating synthetic cells in lab, reconstruction of visual images from brain activity, new america on moon and mars, powerful algorithms for mathematical calculation, exoskeleton, vision for blinds, end of polio. preparedness of natuural disaster and its mitigation, All these are not groundbreaking.
While it may take more scientists, and more and grander hardware (like the LHC) there's still plenty of cool shit left to be discovered. Also some of it will likely have some amazing practical applications.
For example: Some day we may truly decode DNA. I don't mean just sequence it, I mean understand how it works, what it says, completely. Be able to read, and perhaps write, the code of life in a complete and precise fashion. Well that has a hell of a lot of implications as to what one could do with it, it isn't just cool science.
Until we've harnessed complete mastery of the machine that is the human body and enabled ourselves to extend the human lifespan indefinitely, I'd say that we have plenty of new frontiers to strive for.
I hate to be the one that points this out, but everything about scientific research is incredibly BRITTLE with doctrine followed upon and seated at a huge pile of money.
Any person in society is presented with a Chixin and the egg problem if you want to get indoctrinated, you have to have a gigantic pile of cash. If you want a pile of cash you first have to be indoctrinated.
Worse, the entire fascist system is built upon itself with the same people setting the rules who are getting the huge wads of dough because well, they make the rules.
It must fall, it has to otherwise the darkness will grow and this quaint idea that "Gee, we are so smart there is nothing left too learn, just details." will continue.
I believe in just the opposite: There is nothing left too learn because DOCTRINE SAYS SO, and you better not say otherwise or you will be destroyed utterly in such a system.
So nobody does.
That is what I believe now: We are entering a new dark age.
What we need is something similar to the dark ages and the plague, which did us a big favor and wiped out 1/3rd of Europes nobility class and the holders of "doctrine" which freed others to bring about a revolution in thinking.
We can first begin by killing off the bankers, and most of all of Europes and the United States technocratic/academic ruling classes.
Maybe Russia or China would be kind enough to nuke us to get the ball rolling.
Lets see what can happen when these bankers and technocrats are gone, and people use science to learn to develop humanity as the goal instead of using it to make ibullshit.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Groundbreaking science is not happening right now, but it is necessary for future expansions of science.
Right now, I feel like we're in the period between the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein's Special Relativity. We're 99% sure of everything we know, but there's a last 1% that doesn't quite add up. Little oddities, like nobody having a good idea as to why inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same. And once some actual genius figures out the key, "breaks the ground" as it were, that 1% will bloom into entire new fields of science. To keep up the relativity metaphor, nobody in the 1890s had any concept of quantum physics, which is now a massive field with sub-branches that you can get a doctorate in.
Soon - probably within a few decades - someone will discover something groundbreaking, which in turn will trigger off more new discoveries. Science tends to work like that - once a critical mass of knowledge is reached in an area, it grows explosively until we near the limits of the field. Electricity is a great example. Dozens, even hundreds, of groundbreaking scientists and engineers, making their mark in electric science in a very short period of time. There were similar bursts for aeronautics, computer science, nearly any field.
As for what this groundbreaking new field of science will be? No idea. The sci-fi nerd in me would like it to be some sort of hyperspace, to let us explore the stars in reasonable timespans, but that's no likelier than any other thing.
When Quantum mechanics can be explained by General Relativity or vice versa.
How, exactly and what, exactly is Gravity?
The same goes for light and the rest of EM - sorry saying it's both a particle and a wave is a cop out - tell me WTF it IS.
There's a shit load of things that probably won't lead to some shiny billionaire/trillionaire making product but would really REALLY make our understanding of physics and science that much more ... understandable.
OH - HOW did life start?! Let's not leave out the biological sciences shall we?
One word: Graphene.
Think. You could either go and spend your life in your attempt to invent something, break your financial security and health (think of Mr. Goodyear, sure everyone knows his name now but he was poor most of his life). And in this time and age, chances are good that as soon as you actually have something worthwhile, some shyster will come along with some hare brained patent and rob you.
Or you could hope onto the latest fad bandwagon and try to mooch yourself.
Look around you and tell me which is it if you just want money. Because, essentially, that's what drives invention today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not only every breakthrough that could be made has already been made, it gets worse for the liberal arts. All the Great American Novels that could be written has already been written. Same with great poems, great opera, great screen plays and great musicals. Nothing more to invent. That is all folks. The last guy to leave please turn off the switch.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Genetics
Molecular Biology
Biophysics
Physics (ala Hadron)
Organic Chemistry
Robotics
Those are just a few of the totally awesome areas of Science right now. Maybe we all just get jaded by just how fast our daily lives seem to be to stop and think how incredible all of this is.
10 years ago most people never thought of having a cell phone let alone one with GPS, the Internet, SIRI, streaming video etc.
LSD
thats all you need
Cancer used to be a total death sentence, but now it is not. It required large amount of intricate research that turned into drugs like Gleevec which treat chronic myeloid leukemia as well as other cancers. Drugs that work on turning on or off cellular communication pathways are just over the horizon.
Approaching this empirically, with a couple of 50-year intervals:
1912-1962 general relativity, discovery of DNA, yada yada
1963-2013 quantum chromodynamics, I grant you that... and supersymmetry or some such shit, various biotech engineering feats working out the details
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries#20th_century
There does seem to be a trend towards application of established theories (essentially an engineering exercise) as opposed to new fundamental discoveries.
The modern epistemic culture of research, like all cultures, is the apex of the form and cannot be improved upon &tc. From this glorious pinnacle surely there could be no blind spots, epistemological or actual. Everything I see through the perfect lens of the culture I belong to belongs to the culture I belong to, from which even an illiterate buffoon could extrapolate .... a swan.
You realize that discoveries like his only come very rarely as he discussed new areas of science. How many other physicists out there were around Einstein's time?
I'll mention an invention that is "ground breaking" and done in my lifetime.
100Gb Ethernet.
Growing up, I had access to a 300baud modem. That's 300 tones per second. So if one "tone" equated to a bit, then this modem could send 300 bits per second.
100Gb is 107,374,182,400 bits.
or the equivalent of 357,913,942 300baud modems or more modems than the population of the United States (~313m).
Someone had to discover the technologies and methods required to be able to transmit multiple signals at 12.5Gb/sec, and how to transmit multiple wavelengths down the same copper cable or optical fibre without interference...
Hard drive technology? When I graduated from college, the disk arrays I worked on had 9, 18 and 36GB drives in them. So a TB was a lot of storage. Now with advances in hard drive technology like GMR we have multi Terabyte hard drives in our laptops.
Go back and read the newspapers on microfiche of when Einstein made his discoveries. I doubt people were throwing parades in his honor.
Broaden your scope into what areas you're looking at for "discoveries".
Other well known "inventors":
Werner VonBraun / Robert Goddard
Jonas Salk - discovered the cure for Polio
Stephen Hawking...
Edward Jenner -- Discovered vaccinations...
I thought it said, "Is the Era of Groundbreaking Silence Over?", and thought, yeah John Cage did that like sixty years ago.
Not until I am standing in a space suit collecting monopoles out in the rings of Saturn and trying to slink my way around the tax collector to sell my goods on Luna will groundbreaking science be over.
There will be about 1 Million years before a speciation event. Then a lag time of 100,000 years for the next 'break through'.
The next intelligent species will NOT be human.
Snicker snicker Hoy Hoy. You bought the wrong stock.
The number of topical new discoveries that I can imagine putting "i" in front of, or Android versions of, is amazing. Or the other way, imagine a Johnny Cash song about it. The "ground" is every direction from the obvious. If "groundbreaking" means "outside the expected", the capacity of Mankind to anticipate only the obvious is enormous.
Gently reply
Why, just the other day I had ten guys with shovels on one group, and ten guys without shovels in another for a control group, and I ran an experiment on groundbreaking. Amazingly, the guys with shovels consistently did better. I expect to publish in Nature shortly, as soon as they it through peer review. I controlled for sleep, nutrition, and recent sexual activity. Because it is, after all, dirty work.
Groundbreaking science lives on. Can you dig it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It bugs the crap outta me when people start equating flying cars to breaking science. Science is the fundamental stuff like the physics or biology. Engineering is the practical application of science and building things. 10-gig ethernet is the application of existing scientific principles. Now a flying car could be a scientific breakthrough if it involves a new anti-gravity module but not if it's just a small plane.
I forsee new breakthroughs in materials science as we are starting to understand material properties in new ways (the science) and learning how to manufacture new materials with unique properties (the engineering side of the equation).
Why does anything exist? Physicists talk about vacuum energy and quantum fluctuations, but why? You answer a question and always there's another.
Is the universe digital? A sort of computer? Is there anything in the universe that can be identified as a real number (a true smooth curve for example? I think the relativity depends on 'smoothness' doesn't it?) or is every measurable thing expressible as rationals and therefore computable?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
As long as science fiction exists as a category, there will be room for invention. Genetics, space, energy, human-machine interaction, soylent green...
needs a lot of work...
I was teaching a physics lab section at a major university. A wide-eyed undergraduate in my class realized that I was a graduate student in physics, and she asked me in a fully earnest way, "What is there left to know? Hasn't everything already been discovered?" I think the premise of the post is ridiculous on its face. Yes, there are lots of people doing research now; more than ever before, and in some ways the boundaries of the known world keep expanding. But any good scientist will tell you form personal experience that the more we learn, the more we see hoe little we know. You can understand some basic systems very well, and there are some you can master. You can even scratch the surface of complexity, but there's an infinite variety to the world, there are new phenomena being discovered every day. The one thing you cannot know is what the future holds.
There's still plenty we don't know, but so much of it is highly specialized that many breakthroughs are understood by only a handful.
Spare a thought for poor Charles Darwin. He published Origin Of The Species in 1859 and, over a century and a half later, only 39% of Americans fully believe it.
At least Samuel Pierpoint Langley, Svante Arrhenius and Arvid Högbom have managed to convince 63% that global climate change is real and they've only been going since the 1890s.
Still, could be worse: Galileo was imprisoned for the remainder of his life and his writing banned in 1618. The establishment (Catholic Church) didn't lift that interdiction on heliocentrism until 1822. Darwin's got another half century before he reaches Galileo's 204 years.
Physics has gotten a lot of attention in response to this question, but what about Neuroscience? As a field of science, the study of the human brain really only picked up speed about 100 years ago. And, that was more so in the hands of neuro-philosophy and psychology (Freud, Bergson, etc). Neuroscience only very recently began looking like what it does today; we have only just touched the surface of answering meaningful questions about consciousness, memory, thought, pattern recognition, emotion, perception. We have only just begun to realistically pose these questions in the context of science, as opposed to a context of philosophy of the mind. We may even find, once our understanding of our brains progresses, that we weren't even asking the right questions about these subjects to begin with. The one consistency about humanity's relationship with any field of science throughout history has been that, over and over again, we think we have figured mostly everything out and all that's left is the grunt work. But every time we reach that conclusion, the next generation of scientific progression flips it on its head. Humanity as a collection of thinks will always believe it knows more than it doesn't know and it will always be sheepishly mistaken. It may be the case that we are capable of answering most of the questions we know to ask (though I doubt this as well), but the bigger truth is that we haven't yet thought to ask the questions most worth asking.
With any luck no one will be able to gather the money or political will to build a larger particle physics accelerator than the LHC. And thanks to the sequester cuts, all the string theorists can be dispersed to the four winds. Those two steps will save taxpayers plenty.
We live in one of eight planets of a solar system. We have not yet visited any of these, but merely our moon. We have not even significantly probed any of them. And you say that there is no more groundbreaking science to be made?
You could have said the same in Einstein's day. You could have said there was no way to measure the speed of light. That we'll never know much about particles we can't see with our strongest optical microscopes. That the atmosphere places fundamental limitations on out ability to observe the stars, and that we'll never be able to detect exoplanets until we build a horking huge telescope that's physically impossible to construct.
Geniuses don't come along very often. It may just be that we haven't seen a true scientific genius in a few generations. Or that people who are capable of earth-shattering discoveries were lured away from science and into investment banking.
If kids would turn off the video games and go explore the world. Clock's ticking, assholes. I want my hover-board.
Work Safe Porn
Two days ago the entry on a physicist, who I thought came accross something pretty profound, was deemed not noteworthy by Wikipedia. I was originally prompted to create a biographical stub on him because they have articles on two rugby players by the same name. But it seems Wikipedia has more in common with highschool than I realized: The jocks get more attention.
Anyhow, this dude from down under found a pretty astounding approach to the correspondence principle (i.e. how QM gives rise) to classical mechanics in a mathematical framework originally developed by Steven Weinberg. Something the latter astoundingly overlooked. The talkback page on this math can be found here. The article itself meanwhile has been deleted. Please note: Not because the math is wrong, but because the citation record has been deemed to be too low by the editors.
There's a blog post with links to his recovered papers (most follow up papers on this were actually lost for a while a never published). So if you have a physics background you can form your own opinion.
To me this is a pretty good example of how really interesting findings can simply be washed away in the avalanche of mediocre papers that get produced every day.
The answer to the general question is, of course no. HOWEVER it has been stalled in the US due to the political nature of our science foundations they would rather lobby, than actually push the boundaries of science this of course has made most(i said most) of them narrow minded. instead of examining facts they criticize the person putting out data that disagrees with there poin of view instead of proving them wrong with facts.
....but perhaps we never will, because all of our upcoming scientists are distracted by the internet, youtube, text messaging and other constant distractions...
Is the Era of Groundbreaking Science Over?
No (by virtue of Betteridge's law of headlines.) I have a dream, that someday /. posters wise the f* up and stop creating headlines that end with a question mark.
But rather than re-examine the underlying theories and masses
Maybe you should look into it more... and realize that physics departments will have whole groups dedicated to studying alternative gravity theories and astronomy groups trying to look for and quantify unseen masses of gas and stars (ignoring the evidence pointing toward a need for non-baryonic mass). It isn't getting just swept under the rugs, but instead being found that things like alternative gravity theories get a lot of things wrong while only fixing one or two of the large number of issues dark matter addresses.
If all, and I mean all, of the known issues can't be solved, then don't attribute the theory as being right.
Well, then no theory is right (without even getting into the lack of 100% certainty in science). There will always be mistakes or a conflicting measurement made outside of an error bar somewhere. At some point when you've covered 99% of the issues, you ask if the remaining 1% needs whole new theory or if it was in error, or requires some incremental new theory.
Many of the greatest minds of our generation - in the US, at least - are being sucked up by lucrative salaries in the finance industry rather than going into science. It's a terrible shame.
Science is far from done, even if we decide to leave the project half-assed.
It's just getting progressively more difficult for the layperson to appreciate what is groundbreaking.
Just like the geniuses of old were polymaths, "experts" at virtually everything, we are at the other end of that spectrum where it takes a substantial chunk of a lifetime (and some serious brainpower) to become an expert at any one thing, and likewise it takes substantially more education just to appreciate the advances in various fields.
Anyone who thinks ground breaking has been done has simply not understood the problem: many current paradigms are loaded with cruft. One important aspect of round breaking is de-crufting how we formulate knowledge. Newton, for example.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
It is hard to have your creativity crushed, correctly, for years and not let it stifle your drive to test the walls of the box. In today's world of mature sciences nobody could make a great leap without knowing a great deal that couldn't be leaped over and where their attempts to leap failed. The people who can do it will be rarer still than in the past and in a time and place to succeed in that leap even more rarely but it will still happen eventually.
I actually think that aside from the base knowledge needed complexity and everyone having thought of everything has nothing to do with it. Great leaps are always simple seeming after discovered and even simpler in the minds of the men who discover them.
Einstein was such a man in a world that appeared to be filled with mature science to those of the day. It all began with a mind who could visualize things others found vastly complex as simple abstractions. Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had.
Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it.
Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed. But they will come. Probably several in a fairly short period of time.
Mark my worlds most of the things we think are impossible today will be possible later. FTL travel? It won't be found by someone trying to travel FTL but by someone who doesn't see the universe in terms of space and travel at all. Twenty or even a hundred years later people will be amazed at how advanced they are, making progressive discoveries that stem from that man's simple perspective. Almost none of them will intuitive see things in that simple way though. They will be smarter men capable of harassing and riding all the complexity of utilizing the model without that simple understanding. Fundamental advancements require thinking in a fundamental way.
How about Tesla? I dare say we have more data and analysis of electricity and magnetism than he did. Probably a much more detailed and complex understanding of even Tesla's own inventions. In fact we tend to think we know all about it. Yet, I have no doubt that were the man alive today he would be doing things that are fundamental progressions of his intuitive mental model on these topics but revealed fundamental and groundbreaking new ideas to everyone else. He could probably explain the entire topic fully in three sentences and nobody would get it. They would just think he was simplifying great complexity for minds simpler than his own.
C'mon, social sciences are still almost non-existent. What exists is more like a pile of heterogenous facts. Still waiting for Einstein here.
Challenge accepted!
Blah, bluh, blih blah blah. Blah blah blah BLAH blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.
Blah blah bloh blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
Blah bleh bloh blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Blah blih bluh, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah "blah blah blah blah blah".
Blah Blah.
Blah blah bluh blih blih blah bleh, blah bleh bleh blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
-Dick
Currently the cutting edge science is still sitting in big non-affordable books or expensive internet dark alleys. Even today my colleagues think atom is last in the line of matter & cannot comprehend "space can bend". We need to get the knowledge to school books, in easy language. There are very few writers who can 'explain' complex things in easy language. (The examples that I have seen for relativity always includes a train & a person, which is not comprehend-able at light speed for a layman.)
We are still waiting for our hoverboard
The article points out that the science popularizers are more well-known now. Maybe it's just me but I'd place Stephen Hawking as the single most identifiable physicist right now. I'm not really sure I agree with the points made in this article. I just don't see it that way.
Imho it seems like the lack of publicity is the reason leads people to believe that there is nothing groundbreaking happening / nothing groundbreaking has happened recently. The media just doesn't broadcast and glorify scientific achievements like it's supposed to. All we ever hear about on TV is about misery and deceit with a few sprinkles of "miracles" / serendipitious happenings here and there.
Sure there are some broadcasts here and there, some websites that do a good job, but ask any person unaffiliated with science ( scientific/engineering career) which ones they know and I bet they'd come up empty.
It is partly the media's fault, but scientific minds are to blame for not being able to make findings in their field interesting enough to present to the common people. It would be in all our interest for the media and science dudes and gals to work together and make science presentable and interesting (without twisting or destroying some facts).
tl;dr fuck that headline; it's wrong
I've rad time and time again how great scientific discoveries come from a non-pressurized work culture. You also need the right people that understand that. They have to have an uncorrupted upbringing, free from the chaotic influences of day to day life. People have been conditioned to accept things as they are and the path we've gone down.
So you get someone who grew up with headphones and a mini-disc player, and finds it natural, or innovative to have headphones in a smartphone. He's not challenging the paradigm in any way as he's been conditioned to his paradigm and his innovations are inevitably an extension the existing paradigm.
Furthermore, as our world continues to get ever-more generic towards this one-world system, innovation breaks down further again.
Blue sky research is research with no conditions whatsoever.
Platforms are key too I think. It's not about getting an innovation out there but getting platforms out there - as many and varied as possible as you don't know where it will take you. Nobody could have foreseen the scale of apps released on app stores and the immeasurable amount of different ways to use the sensors.
The most humble and efficient way to foster innovation is to get as many rich, and interoperable platforms out there as possible and make them as accessible as possible.
Biotech and genomics is big now, so is nano-tech, so are apps. If there are platforms available for all of these, if they're affordable, and they can interact with each other, the innovation can thrive more.
The research environment today in the west today is too formal, too constrained (not interoperable), and too unaffordable for the masses.
People today are conditioned to accept and propagate that environment rather than challenge it.
Basically, we've gone down a tributary and it's awfully hard to now to reverse back up against the flow and keep our options open.
They work for corporate masters who are more then willing to try and charge customers a fortune for slightly tweaked widgets. While being on the right side of a gamechanger is a licence to print money, it's considered "volatile". Most companies would rather just do what they've done before, as they made money before, right? The gamechangers have to fight AGAINST the major corporations to get anything done, and let's look at it, instead of being the default, streaming services are just being used as ways to round out revenues. The Newspapers never made the digital transition, and now it's too late.
It's possible, just don't hold your breath.
a superconductor, and tell if the theory of electrons changes.
Graphene..
I'm surprised yours is the only mention of "low hanging fruit" in this thread. When we didn't have engines, coming up with steam, stirling, and internal combustion, among others, was relatively easy because the goal was simple and the field wide open. Now, we have a number of engines: can we come up with something completely new and unforeseen? Or will it just be refinements and efficiency improvements on the existing models?
Slashdot: Era of Groundbreaking science is over
Scientific American: "3d Printed Human Stem Cells created"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=3d-printed-human-embryonic
I'm not sure exactly WHAT is wrong with Slashdot, but it is probably related to the open source movement somehow.
Which is stupid, and is just a blatant illustration of the author's lack of vision and understanding of the world and of history.
Actually I would say it is pretty much to be expected. We don't really know what the major, ground breaking discoveries are today which will have a major impact on peoples lives 50 years from now. So I think it would be quite normal for a non-scientist to look around and not understand or see how todays discoveries might affect them in several decades time. In fact I don't even think us scientists can do that either - at least with any degree of accuracy.
The result is that when you look back with hindsight you see the "big breakthroughs" for what they really are but this is only possible with hind sight. Who knew that the transistor would revolutionize almost every aspect of day to day life when it was invented?
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard and there may be many others but they haven't been discovered.
Does anyone remember Fukuyama's "End of History"? A very recent theory (beginning of the '90s).
That was before terrorism, before the rebirth of religious fanatism, before the credit crisis, before the monetary crisis in the EU, before Fukushima and the atomic energy debate, before it became clear that the human population is too big to contain global warming.
A paradigm shift might be in front of our noses (or not).
The process of civilization is self-destructive for two reasons.
First, any civilization develops rules and methods and eventually uses those to the exclusion of anything else.
Second, any civilization creates a "system" which must be manipulated by individuals to achieve success.
Both of these remove people from contact with raw reality.
Eventually, people recognize success only within what the civilization already recognizes as important, which excludes any ideas that are actually new.
Worse, the civilization produces its own form of "innovation" which consists of re-applying its principles in new combinations. These innovations take precedence because they are recognized by the audience, since they are based on previously approved ideas within both the system and the rules.
In other words, the problem of civilization is that it re-targets our goals from pure engineering (adapt to reality) toward social goals (adapt to civilization's expectations).
Social goals are expressed through the utilitarian mode of what most individuals approve of. This in turn is based on what the average person can expect based on past successes in the system, and what they can recognize as building on that past.
In short, everything that civilization does is against innovation and more importantly, independent leadership. Civilization forces self-referentiality on its citizens and thus constrains them to its current direction, which is like a kind of super-inertia.
It is for this reason that screwballs such as myself exist. We don't trust existing frameworks, and build our own from scratch. Not only does this mean ditching Ruby on Rails for Perl wildcoding, but also, wildcoding in philosophy and politics so that future generations don't have to suffer under the mistakes of the past.
Futurist Traditionalism
I've often wondered similar things. While science is still being done and many people are arguing that, the level of accomplishments haven't yielded nearly the same results for the average individual compared to what happened in the last century or further. I blame this on society and mainly on capitalism, which only looks to fuel profitable endeavors and people are only looking for the cheapest means to stay alive, or how to make the most money in life.
Space, deep sea, nuclear... general exploration and development as a country has ground to a halt. Instead we're focusing on wars in countries we have no reason of fighting for and patents... then exploiting them. Our country may not be dying, but it's march forward has definitely slowed down. Everyone is out to make as much money as possible. Exploration and being adventurous is no longer part of American lifestyle. It's all about being safe and living as long as humanely possible.
No one takes big risks anymore, it's all about small calculated decisions (mainly decided by a machine), which we bet on which will show income. Even the space industry has somehow ended up in the hands of the private sector, which may seem great, but wont work in our favor down the line when everyone depends on them for their services and the government can't take over because that would be unAmerican.
Our country is totally mismanaged. Our society is bombarded constantly by capitalist propaganda (buy this and you'll be happy, take this and you'll be healthy) and shows designed to placate the mind. Our education system is starting to break down as the less intelligent take over and see fit to destroy something because it doesn't provide instant, easily quantifiable results.
Capitalism may have founded this country, but we've gotten to a point where we've outgrown it. Perhaps not completely... but we have to a point where it's started to hinder development outside of how to shake the most pennies out of the average citizen. This is a time when we actually need a leader to step up and push big businesses out of the picture and actually plot a direction for the country. Sadly, we haven't seen a president like that in many years... or a country that's willing to accept him.
My feeling is, we don't see easily novelties because they are buried into much more data that what the previous centuries' people were used to analyze.
I am aware that this edges to that atrocious Pandora box currently called, 'Big Data', forgive me.
But still, that we don't see innovations as easily as before don't means there aren't.
Even at 'big data' level: 2012 saw the apparition of electoral statistical proofs: for instance, it has been demonstrated that Poutine cheated, and vastly, in his last two elections. There is a math proof, easy to verify, based on stats* --and indeed nobody denegated it.
In a world where 'big data' generally looks rather like 'big brother' or 'FBI knows everything from you', I find it very refreshing that indeed, 2012 big data novelty was the discovery that electoral cheating now can be mathematically demonstrated.
You'll see, some day, one country will set this kind if check inside its law. This, is a scientific novelty if not an 'invention'.
H.
(*) www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1210722109
Herve S.
The fact is, that back in the days, when someone thought of wrap some plant inside a paper, lit it and inhale the smoke. That was groundbreaking science.
These days, it takes a lot more to invent something really new and "groundbreaking".
ground breaking science has hardly begun
Directed at USA law makers, and bribe takers.
PATENTS are killing American (small creatives) business ideas.... that's why USA will fail, greed and corruption masking as good law.
"turn on your spell checker"
Says the guy who writes "hand-waive"...
The trend towards walled gardens, DRM, and locked down personal computers can't possibly help the world make creative, revolutionary breakthroughs. Neither can having most of human knowledge locked up behind paywalls. Maybe the age of innovation is over.
Maybe you should look into it more...
I'm not seeing anything that is accepted to displace the status quo. The status quo is simply defended as "your theory is profound, and if correct would be ground-breaking, but until you get back to us with some hard evidence we're just going to stick with what we've already got."
Well, then no theory is right (without even getting into the lack of 100% certainty in science).
If you cannot resolve that final 1%, there is a serious error in the theory. If, say, Relativity is 1% wrong and that 1% wrong is the light-speed barrier, that changes everything about the postulates that endless numbers of scientists have made because they're assuming that it's 100% right.
groudn breaking science happen by quantic leap. You can't forsee in advance that looking at small effect will yield in a ground breaking effect. Furthermore you can't tell if the ground breaking effect will yield commercial application (maybe not at all!) whereas a small imporvement would yield incredible application (think safe battery capacity increase). That#s why the article / summary are laughable.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As some of the other posters have already mentioned, this idea that there is nothing left to be discovered/invented is not new. And helpful posters have also listed some of the known unknowns -- fundamental forces like gravity, for example. But let us not forget that there are, as the unlamented Defence Secretary Rumsfeld once cited, known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. There are populations of things that we understand enough to be able to predict properties of a thing, build it and verify that the model and reality agree. Then there are a bunch of things for which we have mathematical models that seem to describe the properties of some things but we still don't understand the hows and whys, etc. I think that the theory of epicycles should be an object lesson -- it was a theory that described the visible behavior of objects in space, just happened to be wrong. So the question should be asked -- how much of what we think we know is actually true? And as for the unknown unknowns? Its an awful big universe out there... perhaps a sense of modesty as to how far we are from godhood might help us keep our eyes open?
Out of interest, do you think any of the advances will be in the area of time cubes once the nuking is over?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Groundbreaking science isn't over until the Death Star we build blows up a planet.
I was actually talking about this with a friend, the fact is stuff that years ago I would have consider groundbreaking are discovered left and right.
The problem is people these days are desensitized to such things, not that I blame them.
Can you imagine trying to explain to someone 20 years ago that you have a device in your pocket that lets you, just about anywhere, access all the world's knowledge?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Maybe someone should read a few science blogs every now and then.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Geez, give us scientists some time! We aren't even 100 years post Einstein, yet there were sometimes hundreds of years dearth between great scientific thinkers in the past. Hold your horses and let us get some work done.
Because the education system is now efficiently set up to weed out an Einstein long before he could ever get to theorizing.
E Proelio Veritas.
Just Planck and Einstein published their disruptive papers. Plenty of "Blck Swans" left in Nature.
It seems a lot of people are obsessing over physics when medicine has had the most profound "groundbreaking" advances in human history, and it seems every week there is a new breakthrough.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Has anything as ground breaking as relativity, the atom bomb, and the transistor occurred lately? Not really. Don't get me wrong, some really innovating technology and science has been discovered, but nothing that changes the face of the world so dramatically. The only real modern example is the internet. What may need to happen is another discovery that opens up whole new possibilities then a new era of technological revolution can begin. Perhaps the internet is part of a new era of technological revolutions just starting to happen.
i agree its now crawling so slow that a worm will evolve as the next dominant life form make a space ship and leave us behind as we still DONT get it.
proof americans are retarded
i know what gravity and magnetism are. He don't why is that?
What he is alluding too is the particle that causes mass the higgs boson supposedly found last year.
The next idea to blow the mind of every man, woman, and child, will be introduced by someone who has access to a great artificial intelligence and probably wont understand the science.
what is that song with the 4 guys
D...M...C....A
do dodod doo doddooodo
thats the loegacy of your nation
and its screwign the planet for a few well to do types that have too much
I have two points to back up my answer.....
1. We are living in the most peaceful period in the entire history. As much as I hate to say this... I am in the opinion "War accelerates innovation". Let's face it, without wars such as WW2 and cold war, most technologies would've either never evolve into the sophisticated stage there right now, or never would've thought of. Until another major war dawns upon us, where contemporary weapons are inadequate for one party to dominate... most technologies will evolve at a slower pace. (at least that's my prediction).
2. Academic research now rewards people who write more papers, not people do genuinely innovative work. I've been in academic research, and I have first hand experience on "publish-or-perish". Most academics I see today, they do research with the mindset "Save my career, family and future first", rather with the noble intention of serving the knowledge sphere. Most research now-a-days geared towards "publication generating exercise"... rather true down-to-earth investigations. I don't think we will return to golden age of research, where funding doesn't demand things like "X number of publications", "Y number of patents" and "business plan to sell million units".
Rovelli seems to have gotten past the renormalizability issues of GR.
I admit I've only got through part of his Quantum Gravity book so far, though.
"...Those scientists who were able to throw off the yoke of established knowledge and break new ground on their own are revered and respected...."
No they're not. To a man, they are denigrated and smeared. Being the first person to disagree with established science (or established anything) is very bad for your career...
With all the talks about fracking and shale gas, it looks like a lot of literally groundbreaking science is going on right now.
The reason why the US isnt't doing big science projects is because doesn't have the Soviet Union to play catchup with. The way they fund "innovation" is bass-ackward and will only do so if it is profitable and is "sure to work". As a result we get new electronic gizmos that is basically micronization of older tech and nothing fundamentally radical. David Graeber talks about this in some of his lectures regarding why we don't have robot factories and all the whiz bang tech we were expected to have by now. It's bureaucracy, hierarchy, and how we tend to fund things as a society.
At this time, China isn't really outcompeting the US on any technological strategic front, and the Europeans are more or less on the same squad as the US. If ever the case the Chinese decide to go to Mars, invented a teleporter, or presented a serious strategic threat to the US that may change, but by then it will be too late. I predict that the people to beat in this era will still be the Europeans even in this time of austerity.
If you want innovation, you give a group of smart people who work well together some resources and leave them alone to weave their tapestry of dreams, not regiment them to what bureaucrats think they should be working on or some idiotic timetable.
I think Jeff Hawkins' theory of the neocortex qualifies as being groundbreaking. He was able to assimilate all the multitudes of neuroanatomical and physiological data into a theoretical framework. I am fairly certain most /. readers are aware of this research but it must not be forgotten as an area of research where revolutionary discoveries are being made. Algorithms are already highly developed, and I believe this is the most promising project on approaching 'strong AI.'
I find the new problems will relate to the problem of scale. Large scale, such as that in relationship to entropy. We think today's speak of scale, from biological systems, to CERN data results to the Internet architecture, is complex/hard. We have just scratch the surface of what's to come. And that's coming from a trained physicist.
What we see today, inventions are not science, but that of exploitation of science. With the popularity of "making money" (capitalism is just one of many methods of), we are in the age of science exploitation. That's why the current attitude is that "we're done"... and the result? Social technologies....
creativity is mostly being used to create connections and products and not explain nature. That's not right or wrong, but just the facts.
http://www.just-think-it.com/sal_08.htm
I come here for the love
What about all the research that never makes it main stream. The DoD, DARRPA and the likes. They just don't make DOOMSDAY machines.
[quote]
Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways."
[/quote]
I agree with him.
The current scientific system of funds/grants who dictate scientific directions and scientific fashion streams in a field, together with the need to publish frequently and preferably in high profile scientific journals just in order to make even a chance to get such funds/grants is a toxic mix for "out of the box" thinking and working on "big new ideas".
Simply because they consider it not to be economically viable or even profitable to invest in such research programs.
The extreme competition for private funding, as government budgets are being cut by the global crisis, causes an even stronger need to "score" as soon as possible in a high profile journal.
Not the best ideas get funding/grants, but the ones with the most extensive track record and high impact factor publications.
Science has become about money these days and not about pure science.
At the moment the best bet to have constant funding of your research is to stick to your topic, dive into it deeper and totally relying on your previous findings and the finding of your colleagues/competitors in the field.
The greater the expertise the stronger it is inversely correlated to knowledge. You know a LOT about almost nothing.
This "tunnel-vision" inhibits out of the box thinking and therefore in my opinion I don't see giant scientific leaps being made very soon which compare to or even outshine the Newtons, Einsteins etc.
is not a scientist, and a scientist tries to create hypothesis while challenging his own.
These are not characteristics of the current bastardization of science most people are familiar with.
Nolo Press
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia
( I just put their FAQs page up to show they're helpful: you might want to look at their Products page, instead )
You want to put a brick in the face of abuse?
get "Patent Pending in 24 Hours" and a few others of theirs.
( they were updated after a re-writing of the patent laws recently, 2010 or 2011 or something )
Yes you still require the funds to fight patent-infringement,
but because it is possible to win so thoroughly in willful infringement cases,
you may have a very big stick.
Patent searches? they got a book on that.
Patent drawings done right? ditto.
the whole shamozzle? one on that, too.
Helpless is for those who give up.
The determined can, and often enough to make a difference, do win.
Cheers.
ps, a few years ago I read it cost $1 000 to go from Patent Pending to Patent Application Filed
( and patent actually going to be considered...
IBM and others file Patent Pending and then don't pay the fee,
just to prevent inventions from being patented, to keep them free for themselves & others...
but you had, iirc, a full year to go from first filing to paid & final filing...
anyways, helplessness is an adopted/conditioned posture, not some Universe-decreed condition...
you want to give up, do, but if the case is really clear,
you may find a lawyer who will work on percentage-of-winnings,
instead of up-front-fees,
if you can't afford to prosecute an abuse of your invention right off...
sometimes that does happen, ttbomk...
cheers. )
I would like to suggest a web site that with a "Close Reading" may open up a world of thought and discovery on what has been voiced by two eminent scientists, Lord Kelvin and Stephen Hawking when they said that Science is about over... That is that there is not much more to go besides dotting i's and crossing T's and Mr. Hawking's contention that we are not far away from knowing everything... This artist a Realist Painter would disagree... Reading the first two papers on his site may bring back some excitement... for some.
http://milesmathis.com/pre.html
http://milesmathis.com/central.html
http://milesmathis.com/
Something to think about.