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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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
No it wasn't.
No scientist knew if atoms were real or not, and they knew it, and they had no mechanistic explanation for the regularities in the recently understood periodic table, and they knew it. They had no mechanistic quantitative explanation for chemical reactions or reaction rates, and knew it.
Right now, physicists know that they have no good, experimentally confirmed, ideas for explaining
a) dark matter
b) dark energy
c) the variety of arbitrary parameters in the standard model
They have an large selection of theoretical proposals for the above.
Today they do have good knowledge about virtually all materials and energetic processes typically occurring and observable on Earth,
That's a difference from the 19th century.
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.
Sorry to self reply, but another thought: the only reason people ask this stupid question or make the implied statement is that there's just do damn much groundbreaking science done today. Yes, it's harder to stand out than it was a couple hundred years ago. No, it's not because progress is slower - it's just ubiquitous. Science is more amazing than ever and in a hundred years it will be more amazing yet.
Shit, I think I'm arguing for the existence of something analogous to Kurzweil's moronic singularity.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
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....
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.
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.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
That is all.
Until half of interior designers are male, interior design remains sexist. Lets break some ground and get more gents in there.
Because #Bluntness
p.s. the reason there are more females in interior design is that more females enjoy that kind of work/challenge.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
>
Anyway, "weirdness" you are talking about is about Quantum Mechanics. Einstein didn't like Quantum Mechanics. Today we know we was wrong by saying "god doesn't play dice".
Time slowing the faster you go is weird. Matter and energy being the same is weird. Gravity warping space and slowing time is weird. Plenty of weird stuff came from Einstein.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
The problem with this is that it is completely wrong.
It's solely determined by culture which roles are considered suitable for men and women. I could watch the effect in real life, when former Eastern Europe went from communism to capitalism. The comp science at my local university was quite equally distributed male and female until 1990. And then came the end of the soviet dominated block, and inscriptions of female students plummeted. There were the same females than before, they even went through the same schools than before, just the last few years, when the career gets determined, were different. Suddenly business schools had a majority of female students, and comp science went to a 50:1 ratio of males and females.
If all it takes to change the ratio of males and females interested in a subject is a change of the environment, then it's completely unacceptable to describe differences in the preferences without referring to the environment which determines the differences.
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?