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Nat Geo Writer: Science Is Running Out of "Great" Things To Discover
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "John Horgan writes in National Geographic that scientists have become victims of their own success and that 'further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.' The latest evidence is a 'Correspondence' published in the journal Nature that points out that it is taking longer and longer for scientists to receive Nobel Prizes for their work. The trend is strongest in physics. Prior to 1940, only 11 percent of physics prizes were awarded for work more than 20 years old but since 1985, the percentage has risen to 60 percent. If these trends continue, the Nature authors note, by the end of this century no one will live long enough to win a Nobel Prize, which cannot be awarded posthumously and suggest that the Nobel time lag 'seems to confirm the common feeling of an increasing time needed to achieve new discoveries in basic natural sciences—a somewhat worrisome trend.' One explanation for the time lag might be the nature of scientific discoveries in general—as we learn more it takes more time for new discoveries to prove themselves.
Researchers recently announced that observations of gravitational waves provide evidence of inflation, a dramatic theory of cosmic creation. But there are so many different versions of 'inflation' theory that it can 'predict' practically any observation, meaning that it doesn't really predict anything at all. String theory suffers from the same problem. As for multiverse theories, all those hypothetical universes out there are unobservable by definition so it's hard to imagine a better reason to think we may be running out of new things to discover than the fascination of physicists with these highly speculative ideas. According to Keith Simonton of the University of California, 'the core disciplines have accumulated not so much anomalies as mere loose ends that will be tidied up one way or another.'"
Researchers recently announced that observations of gravitational waves provide evidence of inflation, a dramatic theory of cosmic creation. But there are so many different versions of 'inflation' theory that it can 'predict' practically any observation, meaning that it doesn't really predict anything at all. String theory suffers from the same problem. As for multiverse theories, all those hypothetical universes out there are unobservable by definition so it's hard to imagine a better reason to think we may be running out of new things to discover than the fascination of physicists with these highly speculative ideas. According to Keith Simonton of the University of California, 'the core disciplines have accumulated not so much anomalies as mere loose ends that will be tidied up one way or another.'"
Hundreds of years ago, there was a "diminishing return." The Rennaisance led to a bunch of discoveries, followed by a period of "plateau." Then a hundred years ago there was massive explosion in discovery and theory. To think we've discovered it all is naive, like proclaiming after Newton that there is nothing left in Physics to discover. It might take a while before the next Einstein but it will probably happen again.
How many times has this been said before, and proven wrong?
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
- Albert Michelson,1894
This hoohah even managed to drag me and my BS detector back from Soylent.
(I'm blatantly stealing this quote from one Robert A. Nelson, but it sums up my point quite well.)
In 1894, Albert A. Michelson remarked that in physics there were no more fundamental discoveries to be made. Quoting Lord Kelvin, he continued, âoeAn eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.â
A few short years later, physics was grappling with two tiny details called quantum mechanics and special relativity.
I just got back from a talk outlining the unbelievable complexity involved in the assembly of fleeting RNA and protein complexes that are crucial in translating DNA to protein in our cells. What they are doing and how they do it is not at all well understood, regardless that our lives and that of all cellular/multicellular life depend critically on it.
Three weeks ago BICEP2 gave fair evidence of beyond standard model physics (How else can you characterize amplified quantum fluctuations in the field of gravity?). This is something that only happens at many many orders of magnitude greater energy than we've ever observed before.
And you propose to tell me that science is mostly finished but for tidying up "minor details"?
That's spelled "horseshit" where I come from.
We are not out of physics - still lots of big mysteries: Dark matter, dark energy, unification, quantum gravity etc. It is possible though that we are running out of small scale experiments and future ones will on average become more expensive and take longer. Bigger accelerators. Bigger telescopes etc.
I hope this isn't true and that people can become more clever, but it might be.
Considering that less than 20 years ago there were no known extrasolar planets, no one had ever even thought up of the Holographic universe theory, or debated the existence (and implications) of a firewall around blackholes, not to mention the so dark we still can't find it Dark Matter... I mean - we haven't even made enough discoveries to start making theories yet with Exoplanets (gaseous Super Earths are brand new in the past year, I believe), and cosmology has huge areas to explore and craft experiments around that are literally brand new.
I think we're going to be just fine in the theory and spectacular discovery department.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Science is worthless if we don't use it in practical applications. But if we're looking for reasons why less basic research is getting done, this could play a role.
I think it's a bad thing. Most of our great advancements in consumer electronics, medicine, and computing are based on mining basic research (that was mostly publicly funded). When that mine is played out where will the raw material for new advances come from?
Science funding as a percentage of GDP has actually been remarkably consistent at around 2.5% going back several decades.
Prior to WWII, when the major discoveries in 20th Century physics were made, science funding was far lower. The theory of relativity was developed with this much funding: $0.
The low hanging fruit are gone. The days are past when a Swiss patent examiner could make world changing discoveries in his spare time.
"He is ...a very controversial figure in science journalism (in a good way)"
Good why? Does he have a gift for explaining new scientific discoveries to laypeople? Does he somehow further the state of the art?
Sounds to me like what he does for a living is tell people that scientific progress is ending. I see no compelling evidence from him supporting that point, and I see nothing good coming from pushing that idea.
Many Americans don't even accept evolution or global warming yet. Pretending that where we are is the furthest we'll ever get is not constructive and not correct.
If this is all he's got, I wouldn't even call him a science journalist. He's more like an op-ed columnist/author.
I think you can demolish his argument that Nobel lag is indicative of science slowing down much more easily than that.
Think of the Nobel prize as an asynchronous FIFO. Every time a Nobel-worth discovery is made it gets put in the FIFO. Each year the Nobel committee awards a prize and removes one prize from the FIFO.
What if science is speeding up? Then more discoveries will be put into the FIFO than Nobel prizes can empty. So the FIFO gets longer and the length of time between discovery and prize gets longer.
What if science is slowing down? Than the consumption rate is larger than the generation rate and the FIFO empties. Eventually a scientist would win a prize the same here the discovery is made.
I don't understand this guy's logic. It seems to me more parsimonious that there are so many great discoveries for the Nobel committee to choose from that they are starting to queue up.
So, I think his data indicate science is speeding up.
That's right, Max, there's nothing big left to discover. It's better that you don't study physics. We've got it pretty much all sorted.
It's not like you'll revolutionize everything and get a unit named after you or something.
(More seriously: Doesn't the author understand science? That's not how it works.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."
Michelson, 1903
Agree wholeheartedly. We "might" be saturated in physics but I doubt even that.
We are no where close to being saturated in biology. We don't understand a single
cell, we have yet to create a life from non-living matter, we are no where close on
actually creating any type of artificial life and/or artificial intelligence. We have
barely scratched the surface of the brain or conscienceness or dna. When we have
artificial intelligence, can repair the spine, can repair the brain, understand what
causes retardation and autism and can fix it, can cure cancer, can pick and chose
dna attributes for children, cure aging, reverse aging, regrow limbs, etc... then we'll talk.
Note the "easily". Science nowadays is extremely complicated and requires years of study to even get to the level. While it's always possible to have another genius coming out of nowhere, it's a lot less likely than it used to be. You won't have a single person make a breakthrough in multiple, largely unrelated domains, like back in the Renaissance, either.
It's a fundamentally flawed hypothesis, because by definition we don't know what we haven't discovered yet. I might even go so far as to say the knowledge we haven't acquired is greater than the knowledge we have. This has been true historically, it is probably true now, and it might well remain true for... well, actually, forever, though it's impossible to know.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Actually, I do think it's a bad thing. You might know the old saying "applied research brings improvements, but basic research brings revolutions".
My pet example of this is lasers. The theoretic foundation for lasers was done somewhere around 1920. Long, long before materials were ready for it. Only in the 1960s the first lasers came into existence, huge, expensive pieces of technology that relied on very expensive crystals to work. Only in the 1980s we started to be able to build cheaper lasers, and it took another ten years before they became mainstream in our consumer electronics.
Today, many fields of work as well as leisure technology could not be imagined without that technology. Everyone here is using technology that either uses lasers directly (like BluRay players or the like), or that could not exist without lasers.
But do you think any of the companies that have to rely on lasers today would have spent a cent on it in 1920 when the theory behind it was developed?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your statement is somewhat dangerous in at least one way:
It's often difficult to predict market value of basic science discoveries/breakthroughs.
Famous case study: LASERs. For a time it was just viewed as a neat thing. Nice confirmation of theory for the theorists, a cool feat to achieve for experimentalists.
Turns out they have a huge market value after all, once the idea was out for a while and people came up with ways to use the phenomenon.
Turns out even something as arcane as relativity theory has practical implications. At least in the form of having to account for time dilation in long distance signals like GPS.