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.'"

Comments

Level of public funding ?

[makapuf]

Well, I think this might have to do with the level of basic science funding (of course I don"t have any figures to back that). Also, this reminds me of chemists after organic chemistry / atomic physics discoveries saying that basically, science was done. Just in time for quantum physics to be discovered ...

So, that's great : saying this just means that we're on the verge of a big event in science !

Re:Level of public funding ?

[artor3]

Science funding as a percentage of GDP has actually been remarkably consistent at around 2.5% going back several decades. Note that that is total funding. The split between industry and public funding used to be fairly even, but in the last 20 years the balance has shifted sharply towards industry. And industry, of course, prefers to spend on things that will be profitable in the next few years. So we see great advancements in consumer electronics, medicine, etc., but not so much in basic understanding of the universe.

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.

Re:Level of public funding ?

[schnell]

I think this might have to do with the level of basic science funding (of course I don"t have any figures to back that)

That's not John Horgan's point. He is, by the way, a very controversial figure in science journalism (in a good way). Back in 1997, he wrote a fascinating book called The End of Science, the thesis of which was pretty much the same as this article. It examined a number of different sciences and reviewed the accumulated evidence that there were no more major league breakthroughs (a la relativity, quantum mechanics, the unraveling of the DNA double helix) to be found, and scientists henceforward would largely be fleshing out and clarifying the implications of the big discoveries of the past.

Scientists of all stripes, of course, immediately decried the book - if that belief gained traction it would kill the climate for future funding as well as killing most interest among future scientists from entering the field. But regardless of your perspective, it was a great book since it raised some interesting questions for discussion, and it's very very worth reading if you have any interest in science.

Long story short, Horgan's thesis isn't "oh noes we aren't funding basic research," it's more along the lines of "there is just nothing as huge to discover left, no matter how much money you pour onto it. That doesn't mean science isn't useful but you have to adjust your expectations not to expect any more great revolutions like have happened regularly from the 17th century through the 20th centuries." Many Slashdotters will reject that argument out of hand, but Horgan has done his homework enough that it's a compelling read and worth considering his point even if you disagree with it.

Re:Level of public funding ?

[SEE]

Right now, our current observations combined with general relativity say 96% of the universe is unaccounted-for by anything resembling a solid theory in quantum mechanics. Or, conversely, our current observations combined with quantum mechanics says general relativity is so wrong that it only can be made to work by assuming a mass-energy budget 25 times greater than that of the actual universe. So how can there not be anything huge to discover?

Granted, the stuff might be beyond our ability to discover, but we pretty blatantly don't know what's actually going on.

Re:Level of public funding ?

[Ol Olsoc]

Many Americans don't even accept evolution or global warming yet.

No germane to the point.

Frnkly, I believe it is exactly the point. The People who refuse to accept sicnece that is inconvenient, or just a handy hate-target to their beliefs have already discovered just as much as they want or will ever accept.

The power of willful ignorance is a core value of much of the world's population. And they fully believe we already know all we need or should know. Added to that is a more benign, but no less correct version of "We knows it all!" John Morgan makes of arguing from personal incredulity.

A curve which approaches a line asymptotically will make its big progress early (taking t as the horizontal axis) and small gains afterward. It will still get closer, but not in a way that makes a big change. It's a reasonable hypothesis that science will approach the maximum possible knowledge of the world in the same fashion.

Th old traveling halfway to a destination with each step argument. Nice, but only possible to see in retrospect - and that would be after millennia had passed with nothing new discovered.

The amount of possible knowledge is not infinite.

But it takes a lot of hubris when we declare that we already know almost everything. For those who would say that, I demand the proof.

Prove to the world that mankind knows all but the final bits of all possible knowledge.

Re:Level of public funding ?

[ShanghaiBill]

The theory of relativity was hardly "low-hanging fruit".

Yes it was. The experimental evidence for discrepancies in Newtonian Physics was mounting rapidly, especially after the Michelson-Morley Experiment. Relativity was a simple and elegant explanation. It just took a few key insights. If Einstein hadn't had those insights, someone would have, probably within a decade of 1905.

Heinrich Hertz - 1875

[YrWrstNtmr]

"Sometimes I really regret that I did not live in those times when there was still so much that was new; to be sure enough much is yet unknown, but I do not think that it will be possible to discover anything easily nowadays that would lead us to revise our entire outlook as radically as was possible in the days when telescopes and microscopes were still new."

Horgan is sans clue IMHO

[fyngyrz]

Just off the top of my head, we can reasonably expect (meaning, we're still short of) fundamental discoveries and/or basic technological developments in) artificial intelligence, mind download/upload to any degree, human augmentation (bio, mechanical, information processing, communications), animal augmentation, medicine of all kinds (in the areas of "how we work" and "how to keep us working" almost *everything* remains to be discovered), life extension, genetics, space drives, fusion technology, 3D printing / assemblers, nanotechnology, energy storage (ultracaps etc.), long baseline observing tech, canned learning, synthetic meats, holography, gravity...

And that's just a few of the areas we know about. No one knows what new things may be discovered by further exploration of space and the solar system, the sea floor, the earth beneath us, the various and sundry signals and noises that we can detect from elsewhere, and the ideas that spring solely from thinking about what we already know or suspect...

From my POV, both fundamental and technological development has usually seemed to manifest in a pyramidal fashion; one develops at least part of one level before you get to work on the next. With that in mind, I'd venture that we won't slow down either discovery or invention of things new until we cease discovery and invention among things known. And I don't think that's anywhere in sight.

But... then there are all those ideas in the SF lexicon, at least some of which are no doubt going to show up, either in the manner imagined or via some other mechanism. Frederick Pohl's "Joymaker" basically predicted the modern smartphone (except his device did some extra things we can't duplicate yet... like keep your up-to-date mind on file elsewhere as a backup); Arthur Clark nailed the whole geostationary communications satellite thing, William Gibson gave us a vision of networks that we still haven't even come close to (and I sure wish we would); Robert Heinlein came up with the waldo. There are plenty of ideas that seem like they *ought* to be possible, too, but don't appear to be so as imagined -- but that doesn't mean there isn't another way to get to those goals. Transporters, effectively FTL transport, levitation, etc.