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Science is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck (theatlantic.com)
Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong? An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before. On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress? It's surprisingly difficult to measure scientific progress in meaningful ways. Part of the trouble is that it's hard to accurately evaluate how important any given scientific discovery is.
[...] With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades. As a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against one another, with expert scientists judging which is better.
For the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world's top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. [...] The first decade has a poor showing. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. That's good news if you're on a ship, but scored poorly with modern physicists. But by the 1910s the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics. A golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. [...]
Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn't survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don't look so good, that's bad news for physics.
[...] With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades. As a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against one another, with expert scientists judging which is better.
For the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world's top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. [...] The first decade has a poor showing. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. That's good news if you're on a ship, but scored poorly with modern physicists. But by the 1910s the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics. A golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. [...]
Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn't survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don't look so good, that's bad news for physics.
Bah. String theory has as much to do with it as the flying spaghetti monster.
The pace of discovery is slowing because of the law of diminishing returns. We already picked the low hanging fruit. Now each incremental advance gets more and more expensive, and the number of significant breakthrough "leaps" get fewer and farther between. Same as everything else. Cars, circuits, razors, microwave ovens. Each advance is increasingly more complex and costly than the last.
The reason astronomy has made so much progress lately is because the tools are so improved. Space telescopes, instantaneous global coordination of observatories, adaptive optics... these things didn't exist 30 years ago. We have access to reams more data now than ever before. Astronomy is still in its infancy in terms of data collection capabilities.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
The problem with the "increasingly esoteric stuff", is that's where new *all* physics is discovered. How did we discover magnetism? We found weird rocks that would always point North/South when allowed to rotate freely, and some people decided to try to figure out *why* (scientists) instead of just how to use them well (technologists). Electricity? We noticed sparks of static electricity, and investigated that useless esoteric oddity (1600). Electromagnetism was discovered once we had harnessed electricity and happened to notice that flowing electricity made a compass move (1820). Once we had all three pieces of the puzzle it still took another 71 years before Tesla invented the AC motor, which made it efficient and useful enough to power civilization as more than a novelty. A task by the way that had been tried and failed by many others, it took a madman to invent it, and doing so nearly killed him. (Mental illness is one of the apparent risks of excessive intelligence and creativity.)
Quantum mechanics, foundation of modern computers and so much else? Would never have existed except for those individuals studying the esoteric anomalies of light - black-body radiation, spectral lines, and the photoelectric effect.
If you want to "defeat gravity" (you're talking some sort of antigravity I assume?), you first need to figure out how gravity works - we really have no clue. We can describe it, but don't understand the underlying mechanisms, and don't have any conveniently testable anomalies to investigate. We have galactic rotation curves, universal expansion, etc. to give us hints, but we can't exactly tinker with things at that scale to see what happens. We have Dark Matter and Energy as potential explanations, and we are trying to confirm their existence and nature independently - but that's ferociously expensive research. We've only just (probably) discovered the Higgs boson, confirmation of the Higgs field, theoretical key to the existence of inertial mass - and we may one day figure out how to harness the Higgs field to allow inertial dampeners or other such incredibly handy tools - but we can't exactly sit down with a jar full of Higgs and start tinkering - just producing the things is enormously expensive, and they last infinitesimal amount of time, making any experiments extremely difficult and costly.
The problem is not so much that we lack the intelligence and creativity - but that we're running out of esoteric anomalies to investigate, and the ones we have are extremely difficult and expensive to investigate, so that intelligence and creativity is useless without also having vast amounts of wealth. Brilliance is great and all, but it needs something to work with - esoteric anomalies in the behavior of the universe.
And then of course, there's putting new discoveries to work - that's a completely separate field, and wholly dependent on the "useless" research for new tools to work with. Inventors can't work on developing antigrav drives, because we have no physics to even hint that it's possible. What are you going to do, just start building random shit in your garage and hope something magically works?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.