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.

Comments

Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Fire
2. Wheel
3. Knapping stone

Note that all of these were FREE, unlike climate change "research" which is a vortex sucking all our research dollars these day.s

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot your mom, she gives the most bang for a buck.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Penguinisto]

Note that all of these were FREE, unlike climate change "research" which is a vortex sucking all our research dollars these day.s

This kind of brings up a good point... kinda. I'll explain, though it'll be odd thoughts.

It's not the quantity of research that brings breakthroughs, nor is it money.

It's the intangibles: Creativity, Intelligence, Wisdom. Not enough of that to go around, eh?

Scientific progress isn't something you can mass-produce, and it's not going to follow some sort of goofball variant of Moore's Law. Going from one powerhouse top-end scientific lab to 40 won't suddenly give you 40 Einsteins. You need to seek out 39 more people who are sufficiently smart, curious, creative, and wise to fill them.

There is also the problem of what to pursue. Why is it that overall, we (generally) only chase increasingly esoteric stuff, or pursue avenues that only go further into the weeds (or please political/ideological masters)? Why not encourage the majority of scientists to go after the big impactful stuff, like figuring out gravity enough to defeat it, or achieving telomere regeneration, or similar? Yes, I know, there's lots of scientists going after these (and other) fields, but I suspect not enough. But then, this is not a new problem... 100-150 years ago, the majority of scientists were doing much the same things (e.g. determining the composition of interplanetary ether, Eugenics, or other worthless horseshit...)

Anyrate, these are things that you cannot stuff into a spreadsheet... they're things you have to seek out, nurture, teach (to a small extent), and encourage.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

That reminds me of the time a male deer sodomized your mother. I tried to participate in double penetration, but he kept hitting me in the face with his 12 point antlers.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Monster_user]

Gravity is pretty simple. Big thing pulls little things closer. To escape and defeat it, there needs to be an equal and oppose about of force or energy applied.

Perhaps you meant bypass, rather than defeat? Or perhaps you merely meant a cost effective way of generating enough energy and opposing force to defeat gravity?

Telomere regeneration is another thing. As I understand it, Telomere regeneration isn't even proven to be worth doing at all, its proposed positive effects are a myth. It is just one of many lines of research to understand health and aging, and last I heard it was a wild goose chase or red herring.

The question, which similarly impacts tech support staffing, is whether you can brute force an epiphany.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Type44Q]

Negative reinforcement is a great way to learn what is and what is not funny. The next time you're tempted to say something, just punch yourself in the face.

You'll learn.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[schure]

Gravity is pretty simple. Big thing pulls little things closer. To escape and defeat it, there needs to be an equal and oppose about of force or energy applied.

Actually, Einstein already disproved this.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[BeauHD (5555555)]

wut

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Immerman]

Not really - he just clarified the mechanism.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[eminencja]

unlike climate change "research" which is a vortex sucking all our research dollars these days.

How about gender studies?

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Archtech]

In the wild mania to praise ever-accelerating progress and steadily increasing wonderfulness, it's easy to overlook some of the good things about the past.

Many of the great discoveries and inventions, from the earliest times to the mid-20th century, were made by independent researchers. Usually gentlemen of independent means, or famous scholars patronised by monarchs or nobles.

This gave them the independence to study whatever they thought interesting. No grants, no grant applications, no having to publish 200 papers a year just to stay employed.

A friend of mine, who knows far more about science and mathematics than I ever will, once told me that even the greatest scientists and mathematicians do well to make two or three big breakthroughs in a lifetime. Just imagine what Euclid, Archimedes, Newton, Leibniz, or any of the other great pioneers would have achieved if they continually had to dance attendance on boards and heads of department, and publish monthly.

Robert A Heinlein foresaw the dead end into which science was being driven as early as 1956, and described a fictional body that was as far as possible the exact opposite of modern institutional research: the Long Range Foundation.

"We got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of arms reads: 'Bread Cast Upon the Waters', and its charter is headed: 'Dedicated to the Welfare of our Descendants'. The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers' fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn't enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more [at least $10 billion today] and probably wouldn't show results for ten generations, if ever... something like how to control the weather (they're working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.

"The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of money..."

"Time for the Stars", 1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Immerman]

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?

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Darinbob]

In science there are periods when there's a sudden opening of a field to new ideas, where some breakthroughs will change perceptions of what can be discovered. After that point there's a rush to explore what's possible and then followed again by settling down and filling in the finer details. We had that sort of period in in the early 1900s, we started understanding electromagnetic fields, we had general relativity, and at the same time we also had an advance in technology to be able to explore more. You can see a similar pattern in the past; ie, the Rennaissance for example. This is analogous to a gold rush perhaps.

For many sciences, the sheer cost of doing experiments is rising drastically in order to explore more deeply in an area.

Also consider the number of scientists today versus 1920. Or even the number of universities and labs. Today most scientists are inking in the details of the big pictures drawn by a predecessor.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

It's weird what republicans fantasize about, their mothers being fucked by deer and shit. Deplorables, lol. #Rope

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[jd]

They weren't free. They each probably cost the equivalent of all research in the 20th and 21st centuries combined.

Not that I'd expect those ignorant of prehistory to know that.

And climate research has cost very, very little, but turned up a lot for what was spent.

Of course, those ignorant of what the research has involved or discovered are likely to be ignorant of the cost:benefit ratios.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Wycliffe]

Many of the great discoveries and inventions, from the earliest times to the mid-20th century, were made by independent researchers. Usually gentlemen of independent means, or famous scholars patronised by monarchs or nobles.

This gave them the independence to study whatever they thought interesting. No grants, no grant applications, no having to publish 200 papers a year just to stay employed.

A friend of mine, who knows far more about science and mathematics than I ever will, once told me that even the greatest scientists and mathematicians do well to make two or three big breakthroughs in a lifetime.

Not only were many scientists independent, many of the greatest discoveries were discovered by accident or happenstance. Being versed in multiple sciences and knowing when something is unusual helps too. If you're siloed and paid for doing a specific thing you are less likely to follow an interesting tangent.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

A human-deer hybrid. How novel. Maybe this is how msmash came to be? It is at least one plausible explanation.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Xylantiel]

Even the article itself is part of the problem... Where is this vast increase in funding? It doesn't exist. The summary is a patchwork of half-baked and unjustified ideas. In the U.S., large universities have been largely de-funded and become much more dependent on student fees, such that less independent research gets done. Also maybe the Nobel committee is more likely to look back because... people are living longer! If scientists have to constantly defend themselves from uneducated and not even self-consistent hit pieces like this, it's no wonder they aren't able to do as much.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

You idiot. He isn't going to give birth to a chimera if she was being sodomized by the buck. Maybe in the off-chance that some of the semen leaked out of her rectum and into her vagina, but that seems really unlikely.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Applehu Akbar]

Many of the great discoveries and inventions, from the earliest times to the mid-20th century, were made by independent researchers. Usually gentlemen of independent means, or famous scholars patronised by monarchs or nobles.

Even aerospace offers examples of this. In the early days of aviation, crazy inventors monkeyed with aircraft and rockets, making fast early gains. Then aerospace became institutionalized, with fast progress possible only in wartime. JFK was canny enough to slip through Apollo as a Cold War project, butt after that manned space programs languished - until wild-hair individual billionaires got back into the game. Suddenly, space programs are leaping ahead again.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[riverat1]

Note that all of these were FREE, unlike climate change "research" which is a vortex sucking all our research dollars these days.

Considering that global warming/climate change is probably one of the top 2 or 3 threats to our global civilization it's probably worth putting money into it. I know a lot of you don't think it's that big a deal but you can deny the physics behind it and you're going to have to deal with it in the future.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[riverat1]

I meant to say "one of the top 2 or existential threats".

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[mikael]

96% of the mass of atoms comes from the interaction between the individual quarks that make up protons and neutrons and the gluon field that surrounds them. The only way of interacting with atomic nucleii is with magnetic fields and high-energy photons in the gamma ray range of the spectrum.

From the change in mass during fusion and fission, we get some energy released and captured as heat.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[mikael]

The problem with so many scientists and research labs, is that everyone has to be careful "not to step on anyone else's toes" . So the more people in the field, the narrower the focus for every PhD and post-doc researcher. Plus there is so much commercial software that has been patented in CAD/CAM/FEA/Matlab/Mathematica and animation (3DMax/Unity/Unreal/Maya) that research now is really just analyzing the results from applications or running existing code and not really designing algorithms. Those fundamental science tasks are reserved for"world class" universities.

Someone like James Clerk Maxwell has the full freedom to explore the world of physics and mathematics since there wasn't any other work in the field.But he did write and present research papers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[mikael]

The same happened with the automobiles and steam engines. Thousands of inventors would try adding all sorts of different gadgets and gizmos to improve power and output. Things like carburettors, water cooling, gearboxes, safety valves, piston arrangements like rotary, multi-rotary, V, X and delta. But many inventors killed or seriously injured themselves when their inventions exploded. Then it became better to have trained engineers working in properly funded and inspected labs.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[mikael]

No different from bacterial evolution to be able to process a new sugar molecule. An existing colony of mono-culture bacteria will grow and grow while they can use the normal food supply. Then when they run out of that food supply, their metabolism slows down and mutations start to accumulate as individuals live and die. Every individual cycles through random combinations and mutations of genes, and there are billions of individuals. Eventually one lucky individual hits on the right combination and there is a sudden explosion as that new food supply can be utilized. Then the process repeats.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

You are talking about a deer sodomizing a human but semen going from rectum to vagina is to unlikely? Wha...

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The law of bug fixing strikes again?

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[dryeo]

Things like the space programs leaping ahead isn't due to new discoveries but rather the perfecting of old discoveries. As far as I know, Musk for example, hasn't discovered anything amazingly new, just used old ideas in new ways. There's nothing in the Falcon rockets that are really new, the motors aren't special or anything but he has put stuff together very well, including things like taking advantage of modern computers to land a used rocket. Basically a technologist, which is good because he is making the previous discoveries about rocketry useful.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[phantomfive]

Telomere regeneration happens naturally in the body, with telomerase.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the mechanism address incidental effects of gravity from a nearby object?

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Times have changed. I actually attended a briefing on funding where the chair said, straight in our face, "the government has no money now. Go for the low hanging fruits." Then again this is in a third-world country.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many people just hanging out and not doing science. Itâ(TM)s like a school party in the quad with a punch bowl and the hosts making out behind the wall while the dean searches frantically for security to throw out some raving graduate who never leaves. Thatâ(TM)s what science is like if I do say so myself.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to wear things with wings to prevent that

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice speech. But what does it have on the original post?

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[terrycarlino]

Part of the problems can be laid at the feat of the ridiculous length and span of copyright and other intellectual property law. I work at a national lab and you would be shock at the number of times we can't use some specific mathematical algorithm because some bozo had patented it and it's too expensive to license the number of copies of the relevant software to do the job.

Want to fix the rate of scientific progress? Look into changing IP law, as well as getting rid of perish or publish, change the way grants are administered etc.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Um awesome thanks

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[terrycarlino]

In many cases discoveries were made by people tinkering in their garages. One of the reasons that doesn't happen so much now isn't just because science is so expensive. It's because so much of technology is locked up by IP laws. Most technological advances were made by leveraging the discoveries of a bunch of other people to make something new. Now it's difficult to do that unless you're a big company that can pay for all of the entangled IP.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Black smokers were found when doing grunt job of investigating ocean floor that revolutionatilized our understanding of biology. Exoplanets were found similarly. It changed our estimation of existing planets in universe. Small incremental changes to CPU is grunt work and it has caused ... well everything. Collecting DNA from different species has told us that trees have more genes than we do etc. Collecting data and making small changes enables big break througs. Inventor of penicillin didn't actually invent usable medicine he just reported it and forgot it.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way that we know of, so far.
It may very well be the only way, as the standard model is pretty well explored, but knowing for sure means keeping on digging.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Edison labs used improved glass and pump tech in new ways to make a light bulb that sucked less enough than the others to be a success.
Einstein used old ideas in new ways and deduced relativity.
The inventor of the laser used an old theory of Einstein's and improvements in materials tech to make something entirely new.
Rocket lab used better batteries, electric motors and power electronics from the EV world, and materials tech from 3D printing and boating to make a better rocket.
Everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants, and what counts as an improvement vs what counts as a breakthrough is decided more by the impact of the new thing than by how novel and original it is.
Reusable rocket tech is still in its infancy, and future history will show how impactful this new idea turned out to be.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate change research receives a tiny fraction of science research funding compared to the big hitters such as medical and pharmaceuticals, chemistry physics, and engineering. I know this because I work in the education sector and often the climate research department is only the size of a research group in a chemistry or physics department looking at, say, surface physics, or the behaviour of aromatic compounds.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[ChrisMaple]

If we deal with it, how is it a threat to civilization?
Snow covered roads are a threat to transportation. We plow the roads.
Moldy food is a threat to health. We don't eat it.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Pfhorrest]

The Higgs mechanism isn’t responsible for all or even most inertial mass. It’s just responsible for the little bit that isolated fundamental particles still have after the mass imparted through the better known electronuclear interactions has already been accounted for.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Wycliffe]

Another good example is this year's Nobel Prize winner:
https://www.wired.com/story/me...
From the article: "He hadn’t asked permission, he didn’t write a protocol, nothing. He simply shot from the hip."
It's amazing the amount of scientific discoveries that are discovered like this.
Likewise, just like with education, money isn't everything, and many times some of the best results come
from underfunded places with shoestring budgets or places where the scientists are "forgotten" and left
to their own devices.

Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Immerman]

Are there any? I'm trying to think if I've ever heard of any reputable evidence of anything beyond the predictable effects of being simultaneously acted on by multiple sources of gravitational force (or alternately, the more complex curvature of space they create). Not coming up with anything.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Immerman]

"IP" laws are irrelevant to science - only patents are remotely relevant, and those only apply to trying to sell finished inventions. They have no effect whatsoever on researching new basic principles, or even the pre-market invention process.

The reason so much old school science was done in garages (or labs that weren't much better) is because it was *easy* - the charge of the electron was first accurately measured using little more than a a pair of charged plates and a leaky oil can. The telescope was created using just carefully ground lumps of high-quality glass. You want to measure the color-charge of a quark though? You need a powerful particle accelerator to even look at them.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Immerman]

I had somehow missed that very important detail. Thanks.

Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll

[Bengie]

Seems to me that Newton got the last of the low hanging fruit. We're at a point in history where theory works so well that the only way to prove or disprove something is to have several thousand scientists and engineers working for decades to setup the experiment. LHC is one such example. Technology is still moving forward via the normal iterative processes and physics is currently keeping pace.

It seems the biggest area ripe for a major change to living is nano technology. All of there crazy awesome materials that mostly have an issue of manufacturing. It's also an interesting area because there are so many alloys with different nano-structures that could have countless beneficial characteristics. It's incredibly difficult to haphazardly find these. Seems like a great way to use CPU time to search for these.

String Theory

[lgw]

In physics, the reason for the halt in progress is obvious: string theory. Half the talent in the field dragged into that cul-de-sac with nothing to show for it. OTOH, there's been tremendous progress in cosmology in the past 20 years, just not the specific sorts of discoveries tied to an individual or pair of authors that the Nobel committee likes.

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

No, all the talent is working for investment banks. Why research physics when you can get payed ten times as much elsewhere? And if string theory were a cul-de-sac I doubt so many people would still be exploring that field.

Re:String Theory

[eddeye]

In physics, the reason for the halt in progress is obvious: string theory. Half the talent in the field dragged into that cul-de-sac with nothing to show for it. OTOH, there's been tremendous progress in cosmology in the past 20 years

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.

Re:String Theory

[Crashmarik]

OTOH, there's been tremendous progress in cosmology in the past 20 years

Yep the cosmology community has gotten much better at coming up with bad candidates for dark matter / dark energy. Real shame they are playing trial and error with literally an entire universe of candidates.

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no 'law of diminishing returns'. Keep your economics out of science!

Re:String Theory

[lgw]

Yep the cosmology community has gotten much better at coming up with bad candidates for dark matter / dark energy.

Not to mention discovering them i the first place, which wasn't that long ago. Confirmation of dark matter as some kind of slower-than-light particle only came in 2010 with the WMAP CMBR data. For the first time ever we've had cosmology with significant digits!

There has also been a ton of work on inflation theories, but that can't go much farther without a new way of looking at the universe. Discovering how to make a neutrino observatory would be revolutionary (but likely still not interest the Nobel committee).

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

It does seem like efforts to come up with a single set of "The Laws of Physics", that is, a Grand Unified Theory which includes quantum gravity, have, at least temporarily, stalled.

But clinical genomics is shaping up to be one of the biggest revolutions in the history of medicine which will be right up there in the history books along with antibiotics and aseptic surgery.

Re:String Theory

[110010001000]

Dark matter is the Aether of the 2000's. But it must be there.

Re:String Theory

[Archtech]

No, all the talent is working for investment banks. Why research physics when you can get payed ten times as much elsewhere?

This actually sounds very plausible, especially as the USA has been the world centre of research since WW2. The US culture is almost uniquely focused on money, so many intelligent young people naturally gravitate to finance instead of science or engineering.

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

"In physics, the reason for the halt in progress is obvious: string theory. Half the talent in the field dragged into that cul-de-sac with nothing to show for it."

Keep quiet!!! Don't try to awake people!!!
(& you definitely wouldn't want to make "him" angry@u!!! :-)

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

My sister is a cosmologist maybe she can help. She has to see if it fits into her swing shift it could if the jobs close to the 219 bypass. ill ask.

Re:String Theory

[PeeAitchPee]

Same thing with dinosaur-related discoveries. New tools mean access to data (and thereby new discoveries) never before available.

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Right! When you consider how much it costs to discover anything "major" today, we should count our blessings that we live in an age where there is APK.

APK's hosts file engine is the most amazing discovery known to man. Ever! It will be a long time before anyone can eclipse its greatness.

Bask in its glory, and venerate its god-like creator: APK

ALL HAIL APK

Re: String Theory

[jd]

Nothing to show for it?

We have five different beyond standard model theories because of it.

We have three different methods of falsifying string theory.

We have a deeper understanding of what must be true regardless of how things progress beyond the standard model.

We have a working understanding of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

We have a better grasp of how different models of QM manifest in broader physics.

We understand what unifying forces actually means.

You call that nothing?

Re:String Theory

[dasunt]

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.

This is only true for the assumption that the difficulty of remaining discoveries, as expressed by the resources needed, exceeds the increase in resources we've thrown at the problem.

That appears to be the case, and it seems like the right answer, but I don't know why.

Re:String Theory

[lgw]

You're just wrong on that one. We know it's there for sure. We just don't know what it is, beyond "matter particles, not moving at c". All theories of modified gravity and large dark objects (back holes, brown dwarfs) were falsified by the CMBR data. Whatever dark matter is, it was there in the early universe, in the same proportions as today, interacting with familiar matter only by gravity.

Re: String Theory

[lgw]

Not even wrong.

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

> OTOH, there's been tremendous progress in cosmology

If you look at the statistics, one could say that pretty much all of the planets we currently know, were found during this decade:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoveries_of_exoplanets#/media/File:Exoplanets_discovery_methods_chart.png

And we detected gravitational waves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW170817

And perhaps we should mention also Higgs boson:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

I would say we have done quite a lot more than we did in any decade after year 1939.

Re: String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Both scientists and non-scientists would be well-advised to study economics. There definitely is a law of diminishing returns. Hell, it's why science exists in the first place. If investment in one single thing gave linear returns, people would have singled the "best" thing to invest in and just capitalized on that, forever. The so-called law of diminishing returns is a law that exists because humans with needs and limited means exist and will continue to exist, after which the law will still exist, just unexamined by humans.

Re: String Theory

[jd]

Your sig? Agreed.

My post? It's fine, which is why you're limited to harassing people who hold different politics, via fallacy by assertion.

Re:String Theory

[ath1901]

Each advance is increasingly more complex and costly than the last.

Yes, this. And here is proof. The Michelson-Morley experiment which proved the ether didn't exist was a few meters in size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

LIGO (for detecting gravitational waves) is essentially the exact same thing, just 1000x bigger.
Of course it costs more and is vastly more complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Besides, comparing Nobel prizes says more about the Nobel committee than it says about science. They have awarded far too many prizes to supraconductors and solid state physics if you ask me...

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Also the Bullet cluster basically proved dark matter exists in a very direct way and thats a relatively recent discovery.

It covinced me and I was in the same “dark matter is bunk” camp prior.

Re:String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think he's wrong at all. Dark matter & energy fit the descriptions of aether. They just used another name because aether is verboten.

Re:String Theory

[novakyu]

Egh. You could argue that people who got dragged into that dead-end were no "talents" to begin with. Maybe the 30-year draught in fundamental physics research was meant to be, whether Witten came along or not.

Re: String Theory

[novakyu]

We have five different beyond standard model theories because of it.

If you think that is an accomplishment, rather than a knock against the whole "landscape", you are not a "persuadable".

Re:String Theory

[novakyu]

And we detected gravitational waves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And perhaps we should mention also Higgs boson:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Both of which were predicted before 1980s. We have a draught in physics theory results.

It would have been far more interesting if we never detected gravitational waves (would mean something is wrong with Einstein's general relativity), or if we never detected Higgs boson (would mean there is something fundamentally and structurally wrong with the standard model).

Re:String Theory

[mikael]

I think string theory is the obvious answer. Photons and atomic particles are both energy. Atomic particles can be converted into photons when they disintegrate. Two gamma rays can form an electron and positron. When a photon descends a gravity well, the different in energy levels is equivalent to a graviton - the electric and magnetic fields seem to fall apart or contract. If a photon could be made to wrap around a sphere or itself, then it would be possible that the parts with positive or negative electric/magnetic field would be the ones on the outside of the surface. Then these could have positive/negative charge and be matter/antimatter.

Re: String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a very small fraction of physics research is related to subatomic particles. Most of it is in areas such as surface physics, materials physics, semiconductors, plasma physics, and so on. In particle physics a huge issue is the massive cost of things such as the LHC required to test theories. In solar physics and cosmology, detectors for neutrinos are expensive, and for other branches, computers to simulate materials. The cost of the small proportion looking at string theory is pretty inconsequential in cost in comparison.

Re: String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

In general, people seem to make the most significant contributions early, but the body of information is now greater, so learning enough to contribute takes longer.

Re:String Theory

[Hognoxious]

Maybe the 30-year draught in fundamental physics research was meant to be

Have you tried closing the door?

Re: String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Economics is not science, it is mostly BS, unempirical, unverifiable nonsense. Anything true in economics was already known since ancient times, same as psychology.

Re:String Theory

[lgw]

The Bullet cluster could have been large dark objects though. It wasn't clear is was some kind of particle until we saw the same ration of dark matter in the early universe.

Re:String Theory

[ChrisMaple]

Why research physics when you can get payed ten times as much elsewhere?

Perhaps we need more grade-school English teachers.

Re: String Theory

[ChrisMaple]

Much of economics is BS because it is interwoven with politics, which corrupts economics.

Some economic results are counter-intuitive, and were not known in antiquity. David Ricardo's 1817 analysis of comparative advantage is an obvious example.

Modern advances in mathematics and computers both have allowed economists to tease principles out of raw data, which would not have been possible 2000 years ago.

Re:String Theory

[novakyu]

Oops. That's what that was. Didn't help with the drought, though.

Re: String Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an experimental particle physicist, and I call bullshit. To the extent that particle theory is on the wrong track, experiment (not theory) is to blame. We don't lack for ingenious theoretical extensions to the Standard Model. There are plenty of them. What we have lacked is experimental data that can distinguish between them. (That's starting to change a bit.) Short of that, the theorists will work on whatever gives them the most publishable results. The ball is still in the court of us experimentalists, where it has been for a long while. It is NOT a problem if a theory doesn't make testable predictions, as long as experiment keeps dishing up unpredicted anomalies the theories all missed...which in particle physics, it hasn't been doing.

Re: String Theory

[jd]

It is an accomplishment. We have a very short binary tree of experiments, each of which will subdivide the possible universe in half. Five tests means you end up identifying 31/32 potential realities as impossible.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is a set containing the truth.

I have no interest in being a persuadable. Reality is objective, so independent of any observer and any means, places, times and contexts of observing.

That reality may have strings, it might not. You do not find out by talking, you find out by looking. Science can benefit from maths and maths is a branch of philosophy. That does not make idle gossip science. And that is all "persuasion" ever is. Spare it for the unicorns.

Re:String Theory

[Bengie]

Dark Matter is the Gravity of the 1600s.

Re:String Theory

[Bengie]

In physics, the reason for the halt in progress is obvious: string theory. Half the talent in the field dragged into that cul-de-sac with nothing to show for it.

Saying the smartest people in physics are stupid at physics is contradictory. Either they're not smart and won't be missed or they are smart and they're on to something.

Re:String Theory

[epine]

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.

This is simply not true.

Back when we discovered penicillin, we lied to ourselves in our giddy triumph over the microbial world about what mastery of global antibiotic use actually entailed, so we blindly painted ourselves into a terrible predicament in Alpha Quadrant Superbug.

That's exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit a hunchbacked woman with a gnarled crook hands you in a meadow clearing in the deepest depths of some dark, German forest (or British wardrobe—what passes for a forest on a barren island).

"Help yourself to another square of Turkish Delight, Edmond, it will make you immmmuuuuuuuuune!"

A hundred years passes with Edmond mostly staggering around in a dark pall, but then Edmond finally gets seriously woke to the human microbiome (and, indeed, gloriously complex microbiomes everywhere, if only we'd bothered to investigate with adequate tools).

Personally, sign me up for Edmond 2.0, because Edmond 1.0 was knee-deep in clusterfuckage, and barely had the wits to even know it.

who wrote this

[avandesande]

How does someone 'discover' a theory?

Re:who wrote this

[gweihir]

Simple: Write it down. That elevates it above all the yet undiscovered theories, which are almost all wrong and uninteresting anyways.

Re: who wrote this

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be allowed. If you win a Nobel then a select few get to sit and study with you, others are sent away. Some Nobel prizes really make no sense. They gave a Nobel to green peace once. That pissed a lot of people off

Re:who wrote this

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

How does someone 'discover' a theory?

They don't. It's an invention the exact same as a motor or an LED. The mental processes and actions are exactly the same. Only philosophers know the difference, but they don't, because an invented motor is just a proof of a motor theory "discovered".

Contrary to philosophy, it's all invention.

Re:who wrote this

[religionofpeas]

A theory is, in essence, a very high level pattern that you've discovered in observations.

Re: who wrote this

[Anonymous Coward]

Some Nobel prizes really make no sense. They gave a Nobel to green peace once.

Could you point it out please? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:who wrote this

[Archtech]

How does someone 'discover' a theory?

Simple: just do a lot of reading in the Library of Babel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: who wrote this

[Anonymous Coward]

And to a guy who hadn't yet even made peace. their all looney

Re:who wrote this

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

A motor or an LED is a thing. We can touch it, feel it, see it work. Doing whatever it does. Even if we have no idea how it works.

A theory is an idea that describes how things are and predicts how they will be.

Re: who wrote this

[jd]

A theory is just a model of a subset of reality, not reality itself.

You discover a theory by finding a hitherto unknown model that represents a well-defined subset of reality at a specific resolution. That representation is something you discovered. You found it.

As long as it isn't falsified, is the simplest known model for that subset, and is useful, it'll be credited to you.

As long as all that is true and it's the most expansive and/or highest resolution theory that includes that region, you'll be given recognition for it.

If that's true and it holds up for 10-20 years, unchallenged, as both the most expansive and the highest resolution, you'll be given a major prize for it.

Re:who wrote this

[HornWumpus]

I dinosaur it thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, than thin again at the other end...

Para: Miss Anne Elk discussing her new theory (that is her's).

Re:who wrote this

[avandesande]

You find a rock. You assemble observations into theory. It is created.

Re:who wrote this

[avandesande]

By your definition Tolkien 'discovered' LOTR

I HATE /. BULLIES like ZIP & c6gunner... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: I'm so sick & tired of /. BULLIES. You shitweasels have nothing better to do than HARASS, STALK & IMPERSONATE little ol' me. I've done absolutely NOTHING wrong & just try to make everyone's lives better w/ my work that stops ads & malware.

* As soon as I post, I'm CENSORED to -1 w/ ABUSED downmodpoints by bullies like ZIP, who even admit to this. I caught c6gunner mocking then IMPERSONATING me when he forgot to log out. Zontar mailed me a postcard w/ THREATS on it, then LIES & STALKS me. All because you JEALOUS JOWIE "ne'er-do-wells" KNOW I'm World-Class & you're shit. It's why you hide behind FAKE names & UNIDENTIFIABLE ANONYMOUS.

I'm even improving my already GREAT PHYSIQUE by getting calf implants while you weezils sit around all day on /. STALKING & HARASSING your BETTERS. I repeatedly dust the no-mind bullshit blatherings you BULLIES post to attack me. Like always I WIN & YOU LOSE.

APK

P.S.=> This BULLYING of me is SO UNFAIR & is probably a HATE CRIME because I'm gay. GROW UP... apk

Nothing "went wrong"...

[gweihir]

The fact of the matter is that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and things are getting harder. That is expected and normal. It is also normal that continuing the efforts is highly advisable, as here are a lot of valuable things still to be discovered, it just takes longer.

Well, maybe one thing _is_ wrong: There is a lot of pseudo-science and really low quality science (look to the buzzword-density to recognize this) taking money and attention from actually worthwhile ventures.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's likely part of it. Personally, I've always wondered if the publish or perish model contributes too. If you've got a choice between generating several papers of average quality, or one difficult project that might be yield groundbreaking results or it might just fail and be unpublishable, it is in your interest to do the former. If you've got a logical hypothesis, it should be tested because that's how science advances, but 'I did the right thing' isn't what gets you a job. We incentivize mediocrity in science these days.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[Anonymous Coward]

When a space mission to support a theory or to collect measurements to find a new one takes 20-30 years to get into launch pad or even in the queue for one, it really could be said somethings about low-hanging fruits. Not to even mention particle physics. Other innovation prices have risen recently to cover the engineering sciences and technology, fortunately, and the increasing push for an easier access to super-computing will help as well.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, new discoveries have slowed because too many are intellectually trapped in the wrong, limited paradigm.

And the publish or perish mentality just encourages blathering idiots.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[Anonymous Coward]

These things come in bursts . When a new thing that is tremendously useful is discovered, there is a huge flurry of activity as that thing is pursued for study and more discoveries are made. Let's take DNA. The first discovery (predicated on radiolabeling techniques) showed that DNA was the hereditary molecule in the early 20th century. Then some very clever chemistry discovered DNA's structure in the middle 20th century. More clever chemistry discovered DNA's code a short time later. Then genetic engineering was born but largely useless. Then PCR was invented to amplify DNA, suddenly genetic engineering is easier. Synthetic biology comes along and suddenly we can invent new genes from scratch using the code and structures. Cispr CAS9 comes along recently and suddenly we can talk about modifying genomes of entire species all over the planet with genes we created.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[ganv]

The low-hanging fruit is a big piece. Note that the general public likely didn't see scientific discoveries as a key to better lives for them until well into the 20th century. Even electrification in the 1880s was viewed as an accomplishment by Edison and not by Faraday, and Maxwell who developed the science that made it possible. By WWII, the experts were aware that science held the key to technological advance, but it wasn't until nuclear weapons ended WWII that the general public came to see science as the key to new technology. So there was a huge increase in public funding for science. And many new discoveries have occurred, but the big ideas that were in place by the 1950s have turned out to be good enough approximations that new reductionist science beyond them have not been necessary for most of the technology that has been developed. I suspect that we are in an era where the definition of science is changing. The old distinction between fundamental science figuring out the basic principles and engineers or medical professionals applying the science is fading away. Instead science is becoming the quest to develop tools to comprehend and predict the complex systems that appear in environmental, biological, and engineering contexts, and teams of scientists, engineers, and business professionals that develop ideas and tools that become contributions to society are becoming the focus of public support. Of course these will still be reductionist science trying to figure out what happened in the first microsecond after the big bang and searching for a theory of everything, but it will be more widely recognized that these interesting efforts are not expected to become technologically useful in the foreseeable future.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[vix86]

The fact of the matter is that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and things are getting harder.

Not just getting harder, but more expensive. The major discoveries made at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century were "cheap." Now in order to explore the nature of reality even further, it often requires that millions if not billions of dollars be spent to build specialty equipment in order to verify findings.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[k6mfw]

Not just getting harder, but more expensive. The major discoveries made at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century were "cheap." Now in order to explore the nature of reality even further, it often requires that millions if not billions of dollars be spent to build specialty equipment in order to verify findings.

Reminds me of an article or a youtube vid (I can't immediately what and where) which described big discoveries by individuals in 19th century and early 20th century but in more recent times a collection of people (one has an idea but another got the money to demonstrate it). Or maybe using a real estate analogy, kind of like in 1890 when the Census Dept declared the frontier is closed (all properties in the west US have been settled)?

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[hey!]

Here's the thing about picking low-hanging fruit; eventually the tree bears more low-hanging fruit. The golden age of physics discoveries in the early-to-mid 20th century corresponds with the aftermath of the introduction of quantum mechanics and relativity, and we're still working out the consequences of that.

A single field like physics goes through periods of disruption followed by a long and productive (although less glamorous) aftermath, so you can't judge productivity in science as a whole by a brief run of physics Nobel awards.

And if you follow science as a whole the notion that it has somehow become less productive seems pretty silly. There's been a lot recent groundbreaking stuff going on in biology, medicine, and materials. Astronomy continues to advance -- doesn't the discovery of exoplanets seem like a big deal? In the social sciences anthropology has rewritten the history of human ancestry; behavioral economics is rapidly expanding; and psychology, no longer yoked to Freud, is going through an evidence-driven renaissance.

What's happening is change has become so continual that it's no longer perceptible as a discrete phenomenon.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[gweihir]

"Publish or perish" is one of the root-causes of meaningless but spectacular "research". It is about the most stupid policy you can have.

Re:Nothing "went wrong"...

[jythie]

*nod* one way of looking at it : we went from being 'mostly wrong' to 'mostly right' in a pretty short period of time. Thus there was a period of great discovery, but now we are entering an era of far more incremental improvements. People kinda hoped that 'science' would be an infinitely exponential line of discoveries, but there is a good chance it is more asymptopic than anything else.

Re: Nothing "went wrong"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet, robotics and computers make it also cheaper and possible. E.g. lidar has been used in archeology to find new ruins in rainforest. Theories of olanet formation have been tested in simulations impossible to calculate by hand. Robots take pictures of space automatically.

Re: Nothing "went wrong"...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, if you publish often, it's a form of work in progress, and others may assist, refine, collaborate, or refute. Better to publish a paper, have it shown to be the wrong approach and spend the next nine on the right track, than ten on the wrong one, be a laughing stock and then spend the next ten taking out paid adverts in New Scientist espousing your theories and the conspiracy against you

That's good, right ?

[religionofpeas]

You would expect to see fewer and fewer big discoveries as we get closer to understanding nature.

Re: That's good, right ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many discoveries are prevented from publication because of the peer review process. I would bet a lot of people have always had a perception of the Nobel that is entirely incorrect. Maybe someone could stand up and lambast the trump administration for it. The Nobel speeches are the problem. Only a scientist could listen to a Nobel speech from a winner in an unfamiliar field and say they liked the speech even though they didnâ(TM)t understand it

Re: That's good, right ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobel prize award speeches aren't keeping anyone from their research (unless they waste their time to attend that event).

You might read some other articles that suggest it's too *easy* to get published in many journals that skip the quality peer review.

Also, "which was a more important contribution" is a dumb question. Relative value of things changes with perspective. What an awesomely non scientific way to approach a criticism of science. I wonder if the rest of their survey was the same.

Re:That's good, right ?

[liquid_schwartz]

You would expect to see fewer and fewer big discoveries as we get closer to understanding nature.

It depends on how you look at it. To use a puzzle as an analogy the closer you get to the end the faster the remaining pieces come together. Perhaps we are more akin to having gotten the border done and now have the harder task of filling in the middle.

Re:That's good, right ?

[jythie]

One way to think about it: we have already gone through that period of 'the closer you get the faster it comes together', and now we are 'mostly there', with little details and application to still cover.

Re:That's good, right ?

[noodler]

That's an assumption.

Low hanging fruit

[rsilvergun]

we had a couple of major breakthroughs (nuclear power, the micro processor, germ theory) and got a lot of value out of those for decades. As for scientists being older when they discover new things, no shit. There's more to learn before you can add to the body of knowledge.

Also, we've just plain got less problems. Science has given us enough food to end starvation. The problem is no longer a scientific one, it's a social one. We've got the food, we just don't want to bother giving it to the folks who are starving. Science gave us cancer vaccines, and society gave us Jenny McCarthy.

Re: Low hanging fruit

[Anonymous Coward]

The iron has changed enormously.

C is just far enough from machine code to be useful, but close enough to be fast.

Re:Low hanging fruit

[Archtech]

The exception is software. Our tools have not really changed since the 1970s. And we are still programming in C.

"Uncle" Bob Martin has some interesting things to say about that (hour-long video). Interestingly, his argument is somewhat similar to mine. When computers were new, there were no trained or qualified programmers. So the programming was done by whoever needed to and was capable. Good engineers, scientists, mathematicians - mostly of middle age, experience, seasoned, and accustomed to working in a project environment. They imposed their own discipline. Martin sees the Agile movement as an attempt to recapture those qualities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Low hanging fruit

[ChrisMaple]

It is not accurate to call the microprocessor a breakthrough; breakthrough implies something that happened as a great advance based on a small set of changes over a short period of time. It's easy to chronicle the development of the microprocessor; there were a large number of steps each allowing more functions to be incorporated on a single substrate, and that process took roughly 20 years to go from the transistor to the Intel 4004.

Nobel prizes also losing their lustre

[Seven Spirals]

After giving the peace prize to several bloody dictators the phrase "Nobel Prize" means 4/5ths of 5/8ths of fuck all, nowadays. I have to wonder if the same mentality has infected the folks who decide the science and literature prizes.

Re:Nobel prizes also losing their lustre

[OneHundredAndTen]

Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine/physiology still retain their prestige.

Re:Nobel prizes also losing their lustre

[Anonymous Coward]

Good job leaving out literature. That prize became meaningless once they gave one to that Dylan hack.

And don't even get me starting on Nash's prize for "economics". Sheesh! /s

Subjective awards will always be fraught with criticism. Nature of the beast.

Re:Nobel prizes also losing their lustre

[olsmeister]

Well, sort of. They seem a little cheapened when they're split amongst a half dozen people at a crack.

Re:Nobel prizes also losing their lustre

[KixWooder]

The Peace prize has little to nothing to do with Nobel prizes in science. Academically, commercially and as a grant-receiving (private or government) indication, a Nobel will set you and your lab up for life.

Re:Nobel prizes also losing their lustre

[Seven Spirals]

I won't argue at all. However, I'd rather get a Fields Medal than a Nobel Prize, anyday. Then again, I'm not going to get either one wasting time posting on /. :-)

Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Grog6]

Scientists used to be aware of multiple disciplines, and kept abreast of all developments roughly pertaining to their fields.

Now, all knowledge is locked away behind paywalls, expensive degrees that deport no real knowledge of a subject, and arrogance instead of cooperation.

No one wants to work with other people, because it just shows up how little they actually know; you can BS your boss, but the guy who actually know something see your real self.

As a Tech, I trained engineers who didn't know what a resistor looked like, and didn't realize there was a wattage rating, lol.

Capacitors have polarity, teaching that one is the most fun. :)

I argued with an MIT physicist over a discovery Neils Bohr made in the 30's, and didn't believe me when I showed him a textbook.
He just "knew better". :)
He also believed that driving a car thru protesters you didn't agree with wasn't evil, so wtf.

Science is dead in America, anyway. We'll have to wait for this generation to die off before any progress will be made.

If the closed journals die off, it might start before that, but not by any current "Scientists."

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[OneHundredAndTen]

What you are presenting is anecdotal, limited, personal evidence. Which, as evidence goes, is pretty useless an unconvincing.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[DCFusor]

It becomes interesting if you know science and read the press release sites. Just this week some idiot thought that using lasers to have higher comm bandwidth from a moon probe would "totally reduce" the 2.5 second latency involved in remote controlling things on the moon. More than once a week, for years now, you see people asking for grants (who wouldn't be able to even ask if they hadn't already gotten one or more) for exploring something they think is new - but is already done in decades past and in books they never read.
I'm convinced....it's been the blind leading the blind, in part due to necessary specialization for lazy brains...for quite some time now, and any serious student of what's been going on will tell you the same thing.
Someone "invented" the plasma triode, again, thinking it was going to revolutionize displays, a few years ago when they were a thing. They were most upset when I sent them a scan of a 1950's Phillips data book showing a low voltage plasma triode tube to be used in car radios to save the need for a high voltage supply.
In the past year, someone published a "wow new discovery" that when annealing a tungsten plate with tiny rods all over it - supposedly some photonic device they were trying to make - when it wasn't quite red hot, it gave off green light. Any RF/Antenna engineer would immediately have recognized that it was effectively an array of dipoles tuned to "green". And known that at any temperature, you have a distribution of actual atomic velocities, some of which are faster than the current mean. And that dipoles will selectively radiate the frequency they're tuned to. But nope, another email and another big retraction.
You could fill journals with just retractions for things that are utterly laughable to a freshman in the latter half of the previous century, much less a real pro. And they almost do that if you look. They kinda want to keep it on the down low, due to profit motive in the journals that pretend to peer-review but don't really manage. Even if they did,l they're flooded with junk science, just someone finding one more gene or insect and no new big picture understanding of things.
I'll even debate cosmology, something I like. Dark...whatever - you put down string theory, but dark gravity isn't matter, it's just assumed that since all we know that has mass is matter...we just can't find the elusive particles. And we seem unable to come up with a good new model that would explain any of that some other way. It's not like we go out there and can test some of the predictions either, and a lot of the definitions are circular, even the Hubble constant has "issues" in what we think of as the real world of clusters moving around dynamically as well as space expanding generally. We do see blue shifts, we've found one of our standard candles isn't always...long list and this is only slashdot.
I'll go with increasing incompetence, exacerbated by there simply being a lot more to have to know already before further progress can be made. It's the simplest Occam's razor explanation.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cliff Clavin, is that you? What drivel. You sound like one of the egotistical, grumpy old techs that needs to be replaced by bright young undergrads and post-docs.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

If those protesters are massing in the street with the express purpose of preventing anyone from going about their day I can see his point.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[vix86]

Is this fault of people failing to read or is it the fault of too much information now? It's been said the medical field has hidden discoveries lying around all over the place in previous studies but due to the quantity of research being done now, its becoming more challenging for researchers to stay caught up anything other than their own small field.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, let's examine this post more closely:

Now, all knowledge is locked away behind paywalls

That has always been the case. (On the contrary, there are now open access journals that didn't exist in the past.)

expensive degrees that deport no real knowledge of a subject,

Difficult to say whether there is some truth to that or not. If you adjust for inflation, were degrees cheaper in the past? Maybe a little bit, but it's hard to believe that this could be a significant factor.

arrogance instead of cooperation

It's highly unlikely that the mindset of researchers has changed. They have always been arrogant and fighting each other. Think about Leibniz vs. Newton.

As a Tech,

So your not a scientist. Dully noted.

I argued with an MIT physicist over a discovery Neils Bohr made in the 30's, and didn't believe me when I showed him a textbook.

Personal anecdote.

Science is dead in America, anyway. We'll have to wait for this generation to die off before any progress will be made.

Maybe. There is certainly a lot of anti-intellectualism in the US right now, maybe more than ever.

If the closed journals die off, it might start before that, but not by any current "Scientists."

Again, journals have always been closed, and you can still go to a scientific library and read them for free. So this cannot be a decisive factor. (That's not to say that closed journals are a good thing, they aren't. It's just hard to see how they would contribute to a decline in the number of highly appraised scientific results.)

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Gilgaron]

I agree with you, there's too much information available to keep up, much easier when the percentage of people educated and practicing in research was small. It's like how the amount of content uploaded to Youtube and Facebook every second would take you a year to watch.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Is this fault of people failing to read or is it the fault of too much information now?

Judging by the examples given by DCFusor, I'd say it's because degree programs have become too abstract. There isn't nearly enough hands-on mucking about in a lab, actually putting into practice things like a plasma triode or a tuned dipole. Ph.D. students get buried in abstract theory, and because it's so abstract, they have a really hard time understanding the implications of what they're "learning" in the real world. You can memorize a dozen helpful equations, and still not know what any of it means if you haven't built something that can be described by those equations. And apparently that's exactly what's happening.

Degree programs have been sneering at hands-on instruction as "for engineers, not real scientists" and this is the result.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[TheSouthernDandy]

Yup, and I think all of it can be tracked back to the tyranny of metrics (not the book, the subject). When "doing good science" became formalized into number of publications, or h factors, or any other system, users (scientists most interested in career advancement) gamed the system. And so we now have reams of papers that explain essentially nothing. But we have to read orders of magnitude more just to stand still, and are certainly going to miss the basic fact that it's already been done. But no matter, papers don't get retracted for reporting mild twists on unacknowledged old discoveries, so onward! And career advancement for the savvy operator is a feedback loop--they consume ever more students and postdocs, to do things that have already been done or are objectively worthless, shit out ever more papers, and are judged only on the gamed metrics. They gain editorships, at which point the lowly truth-seeker had better cite their work if they want to get their own work published! And higher their metrics go!

The kicker is that there is good stuff being done in the trenches, which in a pinch is held up as proof the broken system works. But it gets done in spite of the system, not because of it. And given our obsession with metrics, the same can be said of pretty much everything in modern society (American, at least, can't speak for others). So-called leaders, titans of industry, technology, economics--all falling down. But (insert your favorite politician), FAANG, 5G, "unemployment" figures--I must be wrong. And on it goes...

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Grog6]

One of my best inventions was a current mirror and current ladder design I took out of a 1950's transistor databook.

It was Ge based transistors, and transferring the concept to 500V sot-23 transistors was straightforward.

Everyone in my group wanted to patent it, and I showed them the book, with the Quote "Everything old is new again."

They thought reusing an old concept was dirty somehow, lol.

It controlled a 1300V bias voltage with 0.01% accuracy, which did not work any other way; the transistors were arranged to cancel each others thermal drifts, and the guy that tried to use an opamp couldn't get within 10% over temperature. :)

I made the same circuit recently with vacuum tubes for an even higher bias voltage, 25kV, and it's within 1%; I think there's that much drift in the filament transfer function over temperature. :)

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there someplace to track retractions like that?

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Grog6]

You're not even wrong.

Leibniz obviously won, and the argument was long after people were using calculus. We still use his notation.

It's easy to dismiss someone who know how to do things; I still think of myself as a Tech, to distinguish myself from someone who merely thinks.

I actually build things.

A scientist is someone who uses Scientific principles; my various degrees have nothing to do with it at all.

All anecdotes are personal; how could it be any different?

A degree is easy to get, but I started with my hands, and still use them. I build all my own prototypes.

You sound like a dismissive twat; I'd bet all your friends laugh at you like I am. :)

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[gtall]

More accurately, to get to the forefront of any field takes years, and even then you must be positioned properly with the leading lights of that field. Marrying more than one field is laudable but laughable, there's not enough life time. And that doesn't get you there quite yet. You need funding because all the easy stuff has been done. And your funding better be stable over the years it will take you to produce something new in your field.

Stable funding over years, something companies run by bean counters and MBA infected CEOs and their boards and their stockholders do not understand. Well, then there is government, right? Except many pols don't believe in science because it continues to tell them things they do not want to hear, like the pols should stop talking out of their asses about things they do not understand. Yet these same pols are the ones that allocate the science budgets.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm convinced....it's been the blind leading the blind, in part due to necessary specialization for lazy brains...for quite some time now, and any serious student of what's been going on will tell you the same thing.

It's been known for years that especially US edumacation is not very broad at all and not very deep either. So when you need lots of that, you need lots of people. And you get the sort of effect you describe where some loner comes up with a thing that by rights he should have known about, but didn't, so he decided to call it new so he might hang his name on it.

Because "publish or perish" does that to you.

I'll go with increasing incompetence, exacerbated by there simply being a lot more to have to know already before further progress can be made. It's the simplest Occam's razor explanation.

The former says bad things indeed about the schooling system. The latter may well be a factor also, but the things you describe could easily be fixed with a bit of literature searching or asking fellow scientists (old ones) about the thing and they might point you to the right publication right away.

Anyway, this is about (astro)physics. There are other departments that haven't been doing anything remotely like science at all. Openly, to boot. I'm talking about the "academics" that declare themselves to be "post fact" in public. In some places that sort of malarky does get you tenure, but it's entirely unscientific, anti-scientific in fact.

So there are at least two things wrong in various parts of academia. I'm sure there are many more. A while back a professor publicly declared (which has been mentioned here on slashdot) that there are "too many PhDs". So that's another.

Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess you are not a big fan of Category Theory.

Science is not slowing down

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is not slowing down in the slightest, it's gone exponential in almost every major discipline.

What may have slowed down is some people's appreciation of it, perhaps as a result of the strong current of anti-intellectualism that currently pervades society, For others that misperception seems to be caused by the poor way in which they are measuring rate of progress.

Hint: examining Nobel Prize awards tells you nothing at all about rate of scientific progress.

Ugh

[ceoyoyo]

The way the Nobel committee makes decisions has changed over time, and varies by field. Today the science prizes are awarded only after a long time has gone by and the discovery is so well validated that it's nearly impossible there's a mistake.

To say nothing about how dumb it is to try and gauge scientific production by looking at Nobel prizes.

Misleading headline

[Anonymous Coward]

This should read "Physics is getting less bang for it's buck" as the study is incredibly specific in that subject, and this has nothing to do with chemistry, biology, computer science, or any number of other scientific fields you've lumped together with physics through this headline.

Re:Misleading headline

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It even notes the rate remains similar, just that it's costing more.

This is nothing unexpected, and in an economically free society, people can actually keep ahead of the curve, inventing faster and faster and solving problems faster than they become long-term problems.

In short, the OP statement about less bang for its buck is accurate, but the wrong way to look at it.

today it's about VR not R

[Anonymous Coward]

Real physics doesn't matter anymore. Kids think spiderman can pick up a car and throw it. I could go on and on ...

but now, get the hell off my LAWN!

Re:today it's about VR not R

[Anonymous Coward]

Real physics doesn't matter anymore. Kids think spiderman can pick up a car and throw it. I could go on and on ...

Nothing new about that. The ancient Greeks had Heracles, the ancient Norse had Thor. Unnaturally strong characters have existed in mythology for all of history. Besides, not many kids over the age of 4 think Spiderman is real.

bureaucratic needs

[buridan]

I suspect that much of this is the increase in bureaucracy at all levels that has happened since 1980. Universities gained increased oversight needs, which required increased bureaucratic skills by scientists, creating a system in which some of the best 'scientists' are not basically grant writers who do little to no science at all and have a team of undergraduate and graduate students do the work. This slows things down because one of the driving forces of science is theory generation, which is best had in the field by the experimenter... So when we started valuing bureaucratic needs over scientific needs things changed. And mode 2 science over mode 1 science is also an issue... in that change also around the late 80s early 90s, science no longer had to serve science itself, but all science must serve commercial interests. When that happens, you derailed scientific production as you can rightly imagine because a whole new set of priorities shifted and added new bureaucracies.

Exponentially more difficult

[OneHundredAndTen]

In part, what happens is that all the "easy" problems have all already been solved. What is left is the stuff has been put aside for decades, or longer - because it is too difficult. I remember an article in Physics Today in the 80s. That article examined the claims of the day, which amounted to "Japan is going to leave the US behind soon in the science and technology fields". The author claimed that was not likely to happen, precisely for this reason. Which is the same reason why China is unlikely to pull it off either.

No surprise really.

[Qbertino]

The electron is more important than some quark or higgs boson or whatever. The semiconductor is may more important than the question wether my smartphone can run 4 or 8 cores at 1.4 or 3.5 Ghz.

As was crossing the ocean for the first time more important than discovering that new crater under greenlands ice last week or so.

As science progresses, the substancial terra incognita of our worlds grow smaller and dimish. This isn't news and the real progress is in optimisation and applied sciences. Graphene isn't really that much a new thing. We've known carbon for ages. But rather something new made from carbon with some amazing traits that need exporing and testing. That's way more progress then the next big collider or something.

Re:No surprise really.

[DCFusor]

Too bad I burned my mod points above. You got it, or at least a major part of it.

Re:No surprise really.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was your spelling teacher I would be in prison for breaking the chalkboard over your head.

Re:No surprise really.

[Immerman]

>The electron is more important than some quark or higgs boson or whatever.

Are you sure? It is today, but electricity was widely considered to be a useless novelty for a very long time after it's discovery (which was long before the discovery of the electron as the charge carrier). Then we learned how to manipulate them in novel ways - first for things like lights and motors and crude calculating devices, and then, with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, via the diodes and transistors that are the basis of modern computers.

The Higgs boson is confirmation of the existence of the Higgs field as the basis for inertia, opening the door to the possibility that we may eventually be able to manipulate inertia, which would totally upend many current limitations on what we can accomplish in physics. No reason to believe it would allow antigravtiy directly, but a rocket with inertial dampeners (or amplifiers for the exhaust) would revolutionize the field. And if we're able to manipulate inertial mass independently of gravitational mass it would open the door to all kinds of new research into gravity, and who knows where that might lead - gravity is in many ways still one of the "black boxes" of physics.

Really, trying to judge the value of a thing when it hasn't even been known about for a few centuries yet just seems grossly short-sighted.

Re:No surprise really.

[HornWumpus]

You lack imagination.

WTF...spelling words ONE way? Boring.

Re: No surprise really.

[mapkinase]

Graphene. We already gave NP for fullerenes

Feminazis forcing people into work they don't want

[Anonymous Coward]

Let people choose to study what they enjoy doing, and hire the best students for the course and the best teacher to teach them.

That's how it worked before the feminazis took over Universities.

Posthumous null effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't discount the fact that Nobels can't be awarded posthumously. If a candidate is older (e.g., they made their biggest discoveries prior to the '90s), the committee may feel a need to recognize them, over a younger scientist, before they die.

it's easy...

[mschaffer]

Well, it's easy if you know where to look.
That being said, however, just the other day I found a theory under my couch.

SF travel trips

[Anonymous Coward]

Wassup mulattos,

Lots of people ask me for advice re: visiting San Francisco. Here are some tips:

1. Install grindr. The first couple days, you'll probably be doing a lot of fucking and sucking. Accept it and get it out of the way. Pasty white hipster doofuses not your thing? No problem. There's plenty of other cock (and assholes and mouths) to keep your carnal desires fulfilled. My favorite was "big dick rick", a firefighter/amateur body builder. I'm 100% top but when I saw the size of his package, I knew my mouth couldn't do it justice. I even gave him a Chicago ending :) Best part is, he was so impressed with my cock sucking skills that we hooked up a few days later, this time with another body builder buddy of his.

2. Smoke up. weed is legal and it's good way to relax when you're not fucking.

Peer review

[Anonymous Coward]

Peer review also prevents a ton of tripe from being published. Sadly, there are many journals that will publish any crap that they get paid for.

Re:Peer review

[Anonymous Coward]

[Citaion Needed]

Peer review coupled with the western funding models prevents monumental leaps and rewards small, timid steps. I can get any small step in my field of mathematics published .... I know who's papers to cite. However, developing a new field of mathematics? Mochizuki is the only one since the 1940's, and while respected now, he really had no significant research products or grants before 1995

The Cult Mentality

[NicknameUnavailable]

Is what is holding back science. As soon as "proven science" and "pop science" were things, it started to stagnate. There is no science pope, as much as they want there to be one.

Re:The Cult Mentality

[Anonymous Coward]

Usually people who say things like this are members of a cult themselves. So tell me... what widely-held scientific consensus are you a skeptic/denier of? Evolution? Climate Change? Vaccines not causing autism? Moon landings?

Re:The Cult Mentality

[Anonymous Coward]

Cold Fusion. When two of the world top electro-chemist found a new effect between paladium and hydrogen ( deuterium actually) The physicists answer was... That it could only be fake or wrong. Anyone investigating this was a fraud and should rightly have his career drag into the mud.

Fleischmann and Pons were wrong. There is no fusion going on.
But they had the right to be wrong. But what happened was anti-science.

"Extra ordinary evidence require extra ordinary proof". No, it just require one reproduced experiment.

Re:The Cult Mentality

[NicknameUnavailable]

Accusing the other party of your own fault, classic liberalism. 10/10, excellent impression mate.

Re:The Cult Mentality

[NicknameUnavailable]

There's actually lots of evidence these days they were on to something. Check out Nickel Metal Hydride LENR (the new name for "cold fusion" since the incident you describe formed a sort of anti-cult around it.) Even NASA validated the THz-stimulated LENR in Nickel Metal Hydrides.

No shit, Sherlock

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Science indeed is getting less bang for the buck because the further we explore the world the more difficult is becomes. The low-hanging fruits of discoveries have been long picked. And the volume of scientific knowledge has increased so much, it takes up to a dozen of years just to get to know the basics of the field you're interested in.

Also, notice that in the past the Nobel prize laureates were singular persons whereas most recent discoveries have been made by teams.

Science is getting extremely hard and as a result equally expensive. You just cannot expect it to cost as much as it did in the past and has the same price/performance ratio.

You are moving the goal posts.

[Anonymous Coward]

You say there are more scientific papers than ever, but then you say that scientific progress is difficult to measure and conclude that there is now less scientific progress than before. What? You don't know how to measure it, but you say there's less now? You acknowledge that there are more papers, but somehow you conclude that there is no meaningful way to measure scientific progress? You just want to smear science, don't you.

As an older researcher...

[Anonymous Coward]

As an older researcher I am continually amazed at how much money is wasted relearning old stuff. Researchers these days only look at papers available online. So they chase down rabbit holes that were chased down before 1987. It is just sad.
However, I do enjoy sending researchers of old journal articles showing how they have wasted their time. Especially when reviewing manuscripts.

Re:As an older researcher...

[DCFusor]

I do that too! You're after my own heart. Now what are those guys gonna do when we can't save them anymore? Just loop forever rediscovering the same stuff?

Re:As an older researcher...

[Immerman]

How about doing something proactive, instead of just pointing out the problem after they've already wasted time that could have been spent doing something more valuable? Start putting those old papers online, so that younger researchers can easily learn from them, rather than leaving them hidden in an unlit stairless cellar in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'.

Re:As an older researcher...

[Grog6]

I refuse to do peer review; I have yet to see a paper that was worth the effort used to make it.

The last one I was asked to do was by a distant colleagues son; it was twaddle, so I took his name off it and sent it to his uncle, who was in the field, asking what he thought of it. :)

I sent the uncles review directly to the guy that wrote the paper, and they never asked again. (It was a devastating review, and he knew immediately that I didn't write it, due to some easy errors.)

It's becoming a closed system, and money from publishing has overtaken the rigorousness needed to do the science.

I understand that only about 30% of papers can be repeated now; replication of results Used to be the minimum standard to be even called science, now publication itself is enough, in most cases.

I did like the way the CERN guys, when faced with an impossible answer, threw it out to the world, and then quickly announced when they finally found their 60ns cable problem. :)

I wish I had a dollar for everyone who forgets to pull the Collar on the lemo cable, not the cable itself, lol.

The low hanging fruit have all been picked

[Falconnan]

This isn't even that complicated, really. We've figured out the vast majority of the basic principles of the things we encounter in daily life. It's similar to where people live... It's easy to inhabit land that's easily accessible and comfortable. It takes far more effort to blaze trails into difficult environments. Also, as the boundaries expand, it takes more work to expand them further. This is really a sign we learned a lot in the last two centuries, and now the hard part begins.

Society has fundamentally changed as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Society has changed as well. Salk gave up patents to get his polio vaccine out there to save millions. These days, Salk would never have made a -cure-, but a treatment to slow down the virus, so his company can make billions from repeat, sick customers, with additional, expensive meds to handle symptoms.

People as a while have turned into assholes. In the 60s and 70s, building owners had fallout shelters because they assumed that if they, or their son/daughter was at some other place, their lives would be saved. Now, nobody cares, even though the chance of getting hit by a nuke is greater now than during the Cold War. The fact that homelessness wasn't an issue until the 1980s and beyond, when people just stopped caring. When Texans got hit by Harvey, Californians snickered. When the East Coast got flooded, Coloradians snickered. When Californians get burned out of their homes, the rest of the nation snickers. Especially because of the extreme polarization that is the lifeblood of our society, be it social networks or media.

Yes, we have the technology to end starvation, have healthcare a non-issue... but our world culture rather see a few celeberities have everything and live an opulant life while everyone else fights each other.

Re:Society has fundamentally changed as well

[terrycarlino]

Homeless wasn't an issue until the 1980's because until the 1980's cities and towns could pass vagrant laws and tell those without an abode within the jurisdiction to be at the city line by sundown. Then vagrancy laws were declared unconstitutional and suddenly we have a homeless problem. There is a reason that during the Great Depression camps were formed primarily in the countryside. That was because cities and towns could kick out the homeless.

So no homeless didn't increase. It just became more visible.

As for fallout shelters. In the 1950's it seemed possible to survive a nuclear attack. In the present day anyone who lives in an actual target area, such as Virginia knows that so many nukes will be blanketing the area that everything will be vaporized. Additionally fall out shelters were meant to protect from fallout (no Duh) and we know now that it will be hundreds if not thousands of years before radiation levels will decrease enough to survive outside a shelter. So shelters are useless. They always were. They were a political salve to the population rather than a serious survival tool.

No one I know is snickering about California, and I live on the East Coast.

I do agree about medicines though. Part of that is that Salk owned the patent for his discovery. Now patents are owned by companies and their decisions ARE made by souless bean counters who only care about making money. But they are not reflective of the vast majority of the population.

Peace Prize?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are Obama.. then you get a Nobel Peace Prize for what you will do in the future.

$$$$$ For Science

[Zorro]

Lots of it is $$$$$ for a pre-determined outcome Science.

Believe or DON'T Belive in Climate Change. For enough $$$$$ you can get any outcomes you want in the "research."

Re:$$$$$ For Science

[religionofpeas]

Believe or DON'T Belive in Climate Change. For enough $$$$$ you can get any outcomes you want in the "research."

And the fossil fuel interests don't have enough money to pay for studies ?

I don't think it is the science but the funding.

[jellomizer]

There have been some gaps in the funding for science.
We as a culture love to hear about the new hypothesis (they call a Theory in the news) but scoff at the science going on to peer review and trying to duplicate the results, or a lot of research that just confirms what we believe to be true. Doing good science requires a lot of redundancy.
Now a lot of funding is going to to study things we just don't understand and are principals beyond our ability to observe, so a lot of money is going to finding a way to observe something that we couldn't previously observe. A particle accelerator the size of a city, to observe a particle that may or may not exists. Launching a space telescope to view the dimmest light from the beginning of the universe. Not that such discoveries are exciting, but what we get for the expense is much less then it was back when we just needed to put some oil on a piece of cloth to see radiation, or shape some glass and put it in a tube to see the Universe.

We are spending a lot of money on science to find the smallest thing, while there is little funding towards understanding what is in front of our face, but just haven't ask the question on why and how. I remember hearing about a scientific study done a decade ago on scotch tape, and how it rips into triangles, and based on force and angles what will be the expected tare in the tape. I have also heard that scientist recently discovered that a horses eyes rotate 90 degrees when their head is down and up, so to change their viewing angle. This is stuff we probably though we knew already, and something that some people may have already known. But putting it in the scientific process it get recorded documented and found to be repeated.

Knowledge is not a river

[Nethemas the Great]

It's a delta. With each discovery, new paths of research and exploration fork off from it and recombine. Learning how briskly rubbing hard and softwood together in a certain way to produce fire was civilization altering, but I doubt it was cheap knowledge to come by. When yours and your family's survival depends upon spending every waking minute looking for food and you jagging around rubbing sticks together... But, look at what spun off from that in every way imaginable. Look at what it enabled, and the next things, and the next...

Scientific progress is not logarithmic, it's exponential. Meanwhile the costs are getting cheaper and cheaper. Society could only afford to dedicate so many resources to the pursuit of knowledge if that knowledge was multiplying the product of the efforts of others. Or, said another way, our inventions are freeing up human resources to be spent otherwise. The author was either lazy, or an ignorant fool. Writing crap like this can be dangerous in the minds of certain people. We don't need to give the willfully ignorant any more fuel for their anti-science, anti-education ideology.

Correct Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientist conduct a million dollar scientific meta study and conclude scientifically that science is wasting money

The low hanging fruit has been picked.

[rfengineer]

Two observations: 1) The low hanging fruit in physics has been picked. 2) Physics depends upon engineers to develop the technology they used in their experiments. Even Elon Musk, a physicist, has acknowledged that physics often waits for engineering to give them the tools scientists need to test their theories. Case in point, CERN, which depends upon vast computational capabilities to verify their theories that would have been prohibitively expensive even 20 years ago. LIGO required incredibly accurate distance measurements that could not have been built 20 years ago. Most astronomical discoveries these days (and astronomical scale physics experiments) depend upon real-time adaptive optics that could not have been built prior to the mid-1990s.

Science itself has changed

[Anonymous Coward]

We all heard stories about unfair competition between scientists (e.g. Robert Gallo, or the canadians that improperly got the prize for insulin). However, with the inflation of scientists such behavior is rampant.

Welcome back to drudgedot

[damn_registrars]

It didn't take long to find another front page article trying to tell us that science is a waste of money. Clearly we should just cut funding until the scientists finally get those time-traveling flying cars going on cold fusion. I'm sure soon we'll see a comment in here about how science already has cured cancer but it's being withheld from us because of ... reasons.

Literally Stop Using the Null Hypothesis

[Anonymous Coward]

And let the sparks fly!!!

Climate "Science" and Criminal "Science" and Psychology ... I'm looking at you...

Is science what's broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

All we know from the graph is that either science has stopped progressing, or counting Nobel prizes is a particularly inaccurate way to measure the progress of science.

Why leap to accepting the first possibility, when the second one is so much more believable?

I am pretty sure there's a fuckton of stuff happening right now. I've been interested in archeology lately simply because there's been such a glut of awesome new information over the last decade, and in the old days I wouldn't have been interested at all because archeology was too .. I don't know .. pussy? (It's really my young foolishness on trial here, not archeology.) If Nobel prizes aren't being given out for sequencing and comparing Denisovan DNA with Neanderthal DNA, I kind of think that's a Nobel problem, not a science problem. Because it's fucking cool ass investigation, mofos, and downright interesting.

Re:Is science what's broken?

[meglon]

If i had mod point you'd have them. I made the same point below before i read yours (posting AC usually screws up people trying to find good ideas).

Gravitational Waves

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is often not a linear track of discoveries over time. Gravitational wave astronomy has been about 40 years in the making and is a huge advance allowing an entirely new form of observation of the universe very roughly similar to the invention radio telescopes. It seems likely in the coming decades there will be discoveries based on gravitional wave detection.

Re:Gravitational Waves

[meglon]

Exactly. The most basic, profound, and substantiated discoveries in science have been Einstein's Relativity and Darwin's Natural Selection... but guess what two scientists have not received Nobel prizes for such (Einstein's Nobel was for the photoelectric effect). Judging the productivity of science by Nobel prizes is just really stupid.

Re:Gravitational Waves

[Anonymous Coward]

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

-- Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol 1, ch1. Emphasis from the original.

Re:Gravitational Waves

[meglon]

Well yes, that too...

I was speaking to things contemporary to the Nobel Prize itself (which i didn't clarify, sorry). The idea of atoms dates back to the Greeks BC, and even the resurgence of the idea of atoms was around by ~1600-1700. Darwin died 19 years before the first Nobels, but what solidified Natural Selection was the resurgence of Mendel's idea of genes (and the mathematical foundation Fisher showed).

Oldie Goldies

[Shotgun]

Which was better a song you remember from Aretha Franklin or anything you've heard from Aryana Grande (sp?)?

The test methodology is totally unfair to the recent science in the same way. The older contributions have had time to have ramifications, even to settle into the common culture. The newer discoveries are not as impactfult, because other scientist have not had the time to expand on them.

Aretha moved a nation (and we're all better for it, BTW). Aryana may do likewise (It could happen...), but we'll have to wait and see.

Yeah like climate science

[Anonymous Coward]

This field is a joke. Most people get funding on the fear the world is going to end. Its the most lucrative but nothing is coming out of it. The world is not ending.

Re:I HATE /. BULLIES like ZIP & c6gunner... ap

[Anonymous Coward]

mate, there are lots and lots of useless, hateful human-shaped thingies out here. Anyone with a radical opinion, will get targetted by these. They want no discussion, no communication, they're just out to destroy things. The more value things have to others, the more they want to destroy them. It's common aspiration of low intelligence, low empathy, high conformity subhumans.

As a japanese saying goes, a nail that stands out gets hammered down.

While i do not believe they can ever silence you, please do not despair. Your critical contributions to /. are valued by many, however postmodern they might be. Your style is unique, consistent and highly entertaining. It does not appeal to everyone, but fuck those dumb fucks, anyway.

You are a great person, with a distinct personality and strong opinions, and _alot_ more human then your opponents in here.
I have thoroughly enjoyed your posts and your message is as relevant as ever.

have a nice weekend =)

Climate Science

[Anonymous Coward]

What a joke of a career. This article sums it up nicely.

crazy good time for science (epic fail for /.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Understanding is already better. Things get harder. People don't yet understand the implications of what is discovered.

1997 had the accelerated expansion of the universe. That has yet to sort itself out. We discovered that nobody knows anything, and hasn't ever before.

Higgs particles. Gravity wave detections. Another round of AI discoveries.

Judged objectively this is a crazy good time for science, and yet science is still poorly funded and denied by the political classes.

Yet another time slashdot gets its science reporting wrong.

Science Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is a bit more than just physics (although physicist like to pretend otherwise).

Ain't everything.

[meglon]

The most obvious thing that it doesn't seem anyone has mentioned in this is: the Nobel prize isn't the entire sum of science. They hand out a few awards a year, which at best barely scrapes some insanely small fraction of the research going on. It's a pretty miserable test of the volume of productive research.

Low hanging: What is Winter Sunlight?

[Anonymous Coward]

For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.

science is disruptive

[rapjr]

so there may be some attempt to limit it. Try to get a grant to explore something that is NOT an extension of an idea from some previous grant. On the other hand, it might just be that the old scientists now control the grants, so what gets explored is limited to what they find acceptable. Very little basic science seems to be done these days. Try getting a grant to just 'explore' gravity with no specific plan, just to see what you might find playing with some equipment and thinking about the results, something that experimentalists used to do all the time. Experimentalists used to be self funded, either rich from some other enterprise, or funded by discoveries they had already made and sold or turned into businesses. So they were much freer to explore whatever they wanted to.

My opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is too much about data collection without enough data sharing and too much measure not enough pondering an experimenting.

Yes data collection is important, but scientists spend too much time looking for tiny correllations instead of doing dangerous experiments to discover the unknown.

Also universities are good at failing the scatterbrained geniuses that often make good experimentors.

So the problems include:

    * Poor data sharing. Usually requires expensive subscriptions.
    * Universities become the sole gateway to advanced science due to the high barrier to entry.
    * Expolsive and hazard regulation laws are too hard to get licensed.

As a result, the mad scientists of us fail in university because of their one track mind that does not want to do anything but what catches their interests.

We're too structured for mad scientists to thrive, costing all of science.

Solutions:

    * Encourage and fund research based on strength of proposed research, not university qualifications of researchers.
    * Relax laws on explosives to encourage mad scientists to experiment in their backyard.
    * Make it eaiser to comply with toxic/hazard laws by creating and funding compliance assistants who assist aspiring scientists with understanding toxic/hazard regulations.
    * Make it easier to pass university when being "pointy" instead of "well rounded".

for physics...

[Anonymous Coward]

The title says science but the article measures physics.

I would say physics is a past the point of low hanging fruit. The amount of funding/equipment needed to research a earth changing/nobel winning discovery is monstrous. Gone are the days where a microscope with some plates can measure the charge of an electron or looking at the stars can come up with classical mechanics. Pure math and thought experiments need little funding back in Einstein's day but try to prove out string theory on a budget. Neutrinos, Higgs, etc etc.. all these things need massive machinery to study. Galileo came up with inertia with a ball and 2 wood ramps. What can you do with the same funding now? Nothing.... The easy stuffs' been done.

Genetic engineering, material science.. those are fertile ground for big advances in knowledge with little capital needs.

The Rise of the Professional Physicist

[The Snazster]

In theoretical physics, we have to ask ourselves why there have been no major breakthroughs since the introduction of Relativity and Quantum Physics, around a century ago.

I suspect a big part of the problem is that there is now a very rigorous and well-defined path to becoming acknowledged as a physicist and, unless this is followed, an individual seeking to explore and possibly contribute to this area of knowledge is defined and dismissed as a crackpot if they have not followed that path. In many ways, mainstream theoretical physics is now in the hands of something akin to a medieval guild or, at best, a nineteenth century labor union. Were they first produced today, Einstein's early defining works would go straight into the crackpot file (recall that he was working as a patent clerk when he submitted his four groundbreaking papers, which included special relativity and E=MC2).

A canalization of mindset can result from years of specific training along a relatively narrow path. There is also an almost inevitable screening – a possible result of prejudice – that works to the detriment of people without the “approved” mindset of the day. There are certainly physicists who beat the odds and avoid this, but they cannot possibly exist in the numbers they should.

It has been estimated that there may be less than 200 full-time theoretical physicists in the world that are not adherents of string theory, a mathematically attractive but apparently useless line of inquiry. This is because so many of the older physicists, who are string theory adherents, are the ones controlling entry into their field. It also takes a pretty big man (or woman) to admit they've devoted their career to barking up the wrong tree.

While it potentially only takes one person to develop a critical theory, the odds of finding that particular theory are directly related to how many researchers (assuming no differences in distribution of their ability) are able to direct their efforts in that direction.

Re:The Rise of the Professional Physicist

[werepants]

Were they first produced today, Einstein's early defining works would go straight into the crackpot file (recall that he was working as a patent clerk when he submitted his four groundbreaking papers, which included special relativity and E=MC2).
 

The barriers to acceptance you complain about have always been part of science. Einstein's initial ideas WERE initially dismissed, specifically because they were so unconventional and because he had no credentials. The thing is, though, his ideas were RIGHT, so eventually the physics community came around and accepted his theories.

This is because so many of the older physicists, who are string theory adherents, are the ones controlling entry into their field. It also takes a pretty big man (or woman) to admit they've devoted their career to barking up the wrong tree.

Also not new. As Planck said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

I think the real problem is that it takes decades of education to catch up to the current frontier of knowledge in the fundamental sciences. A human lifespan is typically only 80 years - as the article points out, Nobels used to be won by people in their 30's, more recently they are being won by people in their late 40's. It's certainly conceivable that we're getting to the point that a human lifetime just isn't long enough to learn everything that has come before and then have a useful amount of productive years left.

The other possibility is that we are in the lull right before the next major breakthrough that offers us a fundamentally new perspective on reality... but there's no guarantee that those will keep coming. We might get to the point that are models are pretty much as good as they are going to get, or get to the point that our brains / lifespans aren't good enough for us to reach the next stepping stone.

Possibly true in physics - but look at biology

[Anonymous Coward]

There is reason to believe that now is the golden age of biology. The growth in basic understanding of how living tissue works is, if anything, accelerating. Researchers are doing things like tracing the electrochemical chain of actions from an initial stimulus down to the genes that deal with the given situation then out to the reaction. They're basically attempting to reverse engineer life and in that community there's a lot of confidence that they will succeed.

At that point maybe they'll run out of Nobel level contributions to make. But not yet.

Re:Possibly true in physics - but look at biology

[Locke2005]

Two things: CRISPR and genome mapping, are quite exciting now. But really, the information age has morphed into the data acquisition age, e.g. Google can track traffic conditions in real time because every vehicle running Google Navigator is sending back speed data to the mothership. Effectively, every phone is now a continuous data acquisition device. As well as every fitbit.

The problem there is paywalls

[presidenteloco]

The results of all publicly-funded, and partially publicly funded scientific research should be published in full, online, readily searchable, and free to access.

That should be written into the funding grants.

And it's time to make that retroactive.

The needless, wasteful wheel-reinventing you are describing is the result of highway-robbery on the part of old school journal publishing companies.

Hi there, oil industry shill

[presidenteloco]

You do realize that the amount of money at stake for the oil industry (and supporting their dinosaur-pea-brain viewpoint on the issue) is 1000s to 1 greater than the (largely government) funding of climate science, don't you.

So if we suggest that funding-source creates bias, we should statistically expect 100s or 1000s of times as many biased statements coming out against the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as for it.

Enjoy the proceeds of evil. Oil is not evil. Continuing to say it's not causing a major problem IS evil.

Re:Hi there, oil industry shill

[Anonymous Coward]

Oil gave you the life you enjoy today. Don't give me any of that oil is evil garbage. It's what runs the worlds economy. Do you want to live in a wood shack with out heat or electricity? Do you want to live like it was pre 1900's?

Not Like For Like

[ytene]

One of the challenges faced by the analysis in the paper is that it seems to have been forced to assume that external influences on the nature of research have not changed since the "Golden Age of Science" in the early part of the 20th century.

We are now living in what many people refer to as "The Information Age" - i.e. one in which knowledge has intrinsic value.

Much more importantly, we are also living in a much wealthier age, one in which there are no shortage of Venture Capital firms, VC funds and even large, established organisations that run their own so-called moon-shot programs.

Look at the world of Investment Banking and you will see that there are literally trillions of dollars of capital, all swirling around, ready to invest in "the next big thing". Whilst I would be very reluctant to say what sort of influence that amount of pressure has on scientific research (in that it is not clear to me whether that would tend to drive down risk taking and lead to less ambitious experimentation, or whether it would drive up diversity and willingness to take research risks), it seems obvious to me that it will have an impact.

Now look at the overlaps and partnerships which occur between university research programs and big industry. Not only do we have industry directly funding university research, we also have many more cases of very capable research teams setting themselves up in business on the back of their discoveries.

So whilst I don't feel as though I have enough hard data to be able to objectively assess the assertion of the original article, I rather think that the pervasive environment around the scientific community - and in particular the way that the scientific community interacts with the rest of society, has changed out of all recognition in the time period that the paper discusses.

On this basis I would have to respectfully say that this simply doesn't work as a like-for-like comparison. There are just too many contributing factors here.

It's not just science

[Locke2005]

I'm not getting as much bang for the buck anymore either... when did prostitutes get so expensive?

industry shill

[presidenteloco]

Just curious. What is the going rate per word for anti-climate-science disinformation?

Applied science needs to catch up

[ruggard]

Natural science has grown by tremendous leaps and bounds in the last 4-5 centuries. Applied science has also grown a lot, but our tools can only be fashioned so fast to keep up with the new resolutions, new resolutions of data and types of substances and materials that are being created or conceived of every day. We have so many technologies available to play with and rearrange, that we can engage in forms of meta-science - discovering anew every day how to use what we've created, never mind what nature has left lying around for us. While nature remains more creative and ingenious than us, it's easier to order stuff online and discover them in a living room than to organize a biosample collection safari and then analyze it using wetlabs, NMR, mass-spec, etc.

In some realms of science we're caught in a handful of high-expense, low-return endeavors at this point. Many avenues that are currently not in the spotlight are going to turn out to be the way of the future, but we'll only know that after the fact.

Progress in biotech, nanotech, robotics, computing, neuroscience, genetics, energy storage, photovoltaics, networks, complex systems, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, (and several more I'm forgetting for sure) is proceeding like crazy, and prices for all these things are plummeting. When enough plummeting has happened, the basic tools of science and industry will have completely changed in character, and then new waves become possible. There is so much progress it is time-consuming for us to get to grips with it.

Or is it possible that we're nearing the edge of what's possible for human minds to comprehend, and the next steps will involve having AI do the discovery-making, and one of the challenges will be knowing how to get the AI to tell us what it knows in terms we can handle?

This whole discussion reminds me of that Richard Feynman quote about quantum mechanics: (to paraphrase -) we've learned the rules of chess, but how many years before we master the game?

As far as I'm concerned, the reason we're not finding 'new laws' of nature is partly because we've already found so many, and possibly they are finite after all, but also we've created such a vast inner (artificial) kingdom of knowledge that you can live your whole life within it without peaking outside - you can discover what humans have created for lifetimes and lifetimes and never find the end. And then there is Youtube. egad.

AI coming and next paradigm shifts

[Anonymous Coward]

Centuries ago single minds invented and discovered things. Now we have the whole collaborations with tens and thousands of people to make discoveries. Perhaps, knowledge needed to come to new frontiers is too much for individuals.

But that may change with the artificial intelligence technology coming to help limitations of our brains. So we shall see even greater deed achieved. Also, science continuously counter it's own complexities, knowledge gets better organized and distributed, easier to explain.

With changes in the knowledge processing, science can get big boosts unseen before.

The sphere of ignorance

[jd]

Knowledge is best represented as a sphere contained inside a larger sphere representing the things we know we don't know. This, in turn, is inside an infinite hypercube of the things we don't know we don't know.

To double how much you understand requires more and more effort. The volume of knowledge needed to achieve a level of understanding goes up with the cube of the understanding, in this model.

This ignores the loss to the system caused by entropy, otherwise known as inflation. Things get more expensive because that's how life works.

So in order to maintain the same pace of development, you have to increase investment accordingly.

Up to a point. Whenever there's a major breakthrough, there's a massive deflation in costs.

Nice post.

[Grog6]

I like your site. :)

I'd like to do that, but most of the stuff I invent belongs to the corporation. :(

I designed and built a 300A fan driver on my time for a hobby application, and they wanted it, lol.

I can be evil, tho; I convinced a colleague that he could make a photon detector more sensitive by using a driven population inversion to amplify single photons. :) (random noise is a problem... :D ) We were drinking at Hooters at the time, lol.

He did try to patent it, before he got the joke.

I like the anecdote about the tungsten emitter; a lot of LEDs are tuned that way these days with quantum wells for certain energies.

We needed a source of electrons for an experiment awhile back, and they were afraid of xray generation from all my easy ideas, so they were amazed you could make lower energy electrons by shining UV light on metal. :O

I guess no one read the section of the book on Photoelectric effect; I read every paper Einstein published, long before I got a degree, lol.

Few people learn to connect the dots; I've studied in almost every discipline, at this point.

This year has been rocketry, and composite urethane fuels. :) It's a lot easier on paper, lol.

I have a long term experiment running to look into the variable radioactive decay some people have reported; it looks like there's something there, but it's too early to tell what it is. It's definitely not temperature variation. Maybe in another dozen years or so. :)
Why it should vary on a yearly scale for certain decay reactions, and not others is curious to me, but it seems to do so in neutrino mediated decays.
People invoke dark energy, dark matter, and a lot of speculation, but I prefer data first, speculation second, or even third. :)

ArXiv is a great place to find interesting things. :)
Some are laughable, but some are interesting.

Flawed Methodology

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea of using Nobel prizes at all is problematic, and ranking according to more important more so. Besides the initial decade, which from the article awarded nobels more to novel applications rather than fundamental research breakthroughs, the results are actually better than expected, showing perhaps in INCREASE in fundamental discoveries.

Important and more foundational discoveries tend to be old ones, since they open up new avenues of research. Later discoveries will build upon previous ones, and hence, more often then not, be considered less fundamental. The Fame and judging of Nobel prizes tend to also choose those discoveries/inventions that touch upon a large supporting population of research scientists.

Three's the limit

[Anonymous Coward]

A point missing from much of this is that, by their own rules, the Nobel committee cannot award the prize in physics to more than three people. If you write a paper with five people on it, you have to wait for two of them to die before you can get your Nobel prize. That's why Higgs himself got the prize, but the team of thousands at CERN who actually found a Higgs boson never will.

That's a big part of the bias towards older (and towards theoretical) work. Modern experimental projects are just too big most of the time to single out one individual who deserves the prize. You can argue that maybe the rules should be changed, but that's the way Nobel set up.

-JS

Personality valued over results

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that personality is valued over logic and results. You have people running the show that are great BSers. And that's fine, but since they aren't true experts in their field, they aren't even capable of making the decisions needed for advancement.

When we value results over personality, great things happen.

I know why.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we have figured everything out already. Yes, there are still some details to work out, but they are just that: details.

We have figured out enough about the universe to safely say we will never colonize planets outside our solar system. There will be no intergalactic community held together by ships that can move faster than light. Such things are impossible. We are stuck on this rock till the Sun blows us up, and that's it.

First science showed us that our religious convictions were all founded on bunk, but that just wasn't good enough, was it? Nooooo....everything that might give us a reason to look forward to the future must be proven impossible before science is satisfied.

Re:I know why.

[jdschulteis]

We are stuck on this rock till the Sun blows us up, and that's it.

I don't know why I care--I'll be long gone--but I like to think there's a slight probability that a lucky (maybe!) few humans leave on generational ships.

Re: I know why.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you still alive then? What with such fatalism etc.

failed Mass Transfer have we?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken by a non-chemical engineer, I suspect. It may not be a "law" but diminishing returns certainly exists in science.

Engineering Economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Engineering Economy was the most important class I studied as an undergraduate.
My zeroth law of engineering is that money is the most fundamental concept. Without it, engineering would not exist.

All this says is that the committee is afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

Afraid to commit to giving the prize to a recent discovery and then being thought stupid years later when the fad is no longer in fashion. They want to wait for time to tell them what is actually important through the usual accumulations -- press, citations, etc. So they keep plumbing the past for more crumbs. Eventually they will be forced to gap forward for something significant, and then decades of work will no longer receive consideration.

Re:All this says is that the committee is afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to this the fact that less than half of results seem to be reproducible nowadays and you have every reason to delay since the science establishment is now based on publication rather than results and peer review seems to be increasingly useless.

racists gonna race

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard this argument a billion times from all my redneck coworkers. The number you were looking for a 3/5ths, ya racist prick.

Low hanging fruit

[riverat1]

Modern science didn't really get going until maybe the 1600s or 1700s. There was lots of low hanging fruit to discover that could be understood with the relatively crude instrumentation of the time (although good thermometers have been available for about 300 years). Nowadays we're getting more into the details and there are fewer and fewer fundamental things to discover, just things built on those fundamentals. It's like the development of the airplane. Once the Wright brothers got their airplane flying there was rapid advancement in the field for 30 or 40 years but how much has the basic outlines of an airplane changed since then? Once the jet turbine was discovered it's just mostly a lot of refinement on the basic concept.

Need a new thang

[AndyKron]

Maybe we're nearing the end of the road. Of course, people were saying that right before radioactivity was discovered.

You're no better, fuck off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kill yourself, Grammar Nazi. There is supposed to be a comma between your two fragments. GTFO.

There is planety of cutting-edge research

[mschuyler]

being done and breakthroughs have been made, but they acre Classified, as in Top Secret. The research won't see the light of day.

The west, esp. America, is funding wrong ppl

[WindBourne]

Seriously, we continue to put the wrong ppl into academia. We used to put ppl that worked at it, was innovative, etc. Now, it is increasingly, who you know. Sad.

being paid to achieve a certain result

[bonedonut]

cuts into actually making progress.

Back to work Ivan

[Anonymous Coward]

plural of was is were, just FYI.

C'mon, we all know

[Anonymous Coward]

it's that damn sophon.

Low hanging fruit

[aberglas]

When something is new, there are many things that can be easily discovered. But once those have been discovered, only more difficult things are left.

The other aspect is that we can all (in Slashdot) understand how Newton discovered why the moon does not fall down. But the latest developments in Biotech are difficult to follow unless you are an expert. So it seems that there is less new work.

The big advances typically come from the availability of new tools to explore new areas. In Biotech in particular the modern tools are much better than what was available 20 years ago.

The exception is software. Our tools have not really changed since the 1970s. And we are still programming in C.

Too narrow a view of science

[Goonie]

This ranking is roughly akin to assessing progress in computer science by counting the number of new array sorting algorithms in academic journals over the past few decades.

i keep saying

[mapkinase]

Physics is over, but they laugh ot me as if I am some kind of Lord Kelvin

Diversity

[Anonymous Coward]

Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before.

Considering that a non-trivial number of those "more scientists" got admitted by affirmative action, I'm not particularly surprised the "more funding" is fruitless and the "more scientific papers" are mostly useful for paper training your puppy.

A lot of science has become a job

[virve]

The work of many scientists is one of applying for funding and implementing experiments as described in their projects. The blood and passion has disappeared. Among the people who stayed in academia in my generation, I don't see them pursuing /that/ singular idea.

Maybe I am the last of the romantics. So be it.

virve

We get what we paid for

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is a tool to produce luxury products, cheaper crap, surveilance enforcement and weapons of massive and creative destruction.
more money is invested in creative accounting, marketing and lobbying than to actual R&D.