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Science is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck (theatlantic.com)
Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong? An anonymous reader shares a report: Today, there are more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before. On the surface, this is encouraging. But for all this increase in effort, are we getting a proportional increase in our scientific understanding? Or are we investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress? It's surprisingly difficult to measure scientific progress in meaningful ways. Part of the trouble is that it's hard to accurately evaluate how important any given scientific discovery is.
[...] With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades. As a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against one another, with expert scientists judging which is better.
For the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world's top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. [...] The first decade has a poor showing. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. That's good news if you're on a ship, but scored poorly with modern physicists. But by the 1910s the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics. A golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. [...]
Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn't survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don't look so good, that's bad news for physics.
[...] With that in mind, we ran a survey asking scientists to compare Nobel prizewinning discoveries in their fields. We then used those rankings to determine how scientists think the quality of Nobel prizewinning discoveries has changed over the decades. As a sample survey question, we might ask a physicist which was a more important contribution to scientific understanding: the discovery of the neutron (the particle that makes up roughly half the ordinary matter in the universe) or the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the afterglow of the Big Bang). Think of the survey as a round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against one another, with expert scientists judging which is better.
For the physics prize, we surveyed 93 physicists from the world's top academic physics departments (according to the Shanghai Rankings of World Universities), and they judged 1,370 pairs of discoveries. [...] The first decade has a poor showing. In that decade, the Nobel Committee was still figuring out exactly what the prize was for. There was, for instance, a prize for a better way of illuminating lighthouses and buoys at sea. That's good news if you're on a ship, but scored poorly with modern physicists. But by the 1910s the prizes were mostly awarded for things that accord with the modern conception of physics. A golden age of physics followed, from the 1910s through the 1930s. [...]
Our graph stops at the end of the 1980s. The reason is that, in recent years, the Nobel Committee has preferred to award prizes for work done in the 1980s and 1970s. In fact, just three discoveries made since 1990 have yet been awarded Nobel Prizes. This is too few to get a good quality estimate for the 1990s, and so we didn't survey those prizes. However, the paucity of prizes since 1990 is itself suggestive. The 1990s and 2000s have the dubious distinction of being the decades over which the Nobel Committee has most strongly preferred to skip back and award prizes for earlier work. Given that the 1980s and 1970s themselves don't look so good, that's bad news for physics.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How does someone 'discover' a theory?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You would expect to see fewer and fewer big discoveries as we get closer to understanding nature.
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."
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry and medicine/physiology still retain their prestige.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Well, sort of. They seem a little cheapened when they're split amongst a half dozen people at a crack.
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.
I hate fat people.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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?
Scientist conduct a million dollar scientific meta study and conclude scientifically that science is wasting money
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.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
You'll learn.
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.
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.
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.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Not really - he just clarified the mechanism.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Science is a bit more than just physics (although physicist like to pretend otherwise).
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/...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
The problem with the "increasingly esoteric stuff", is that's where new *all* physics is discovered. How did we discover magnetism? We found weird rocks that would always point North/South when allowed to rotate freely, and some people decided to try to figure out *why* (scientists) instead of just how to use them well (technologists). Electricity? We noticed sparks of static electricity, and investigated that useless esoteric oddity (1600). Electromagnetism was discovered once we had harnessed electricity and happened to notice that flowing electricity made a compass move (1820). Once we had all three pieces of the puzzle it still took another 71 years before Tesla invented the AC motor, which made it efficient and useful enough to power civilization as more than a novelty. A task by the way that had been tried and failed by many others, it took a madman to invent it, and doing so nearly killed him. (Mental illness is one of the apparent risks of excessive intelligence and creativity.)
Quantum mechanics, foundation of modern computers and so much else? Would never have existed except for those individuals studying the esoteric anomalies of light - black-body radiation, spectral lines, and the photoelectric effect.
If you want to "defeat gravity" (you're talking some sort of antigravity I assume?), you first need to figure out how gravity works - we really have no clue. We can describe it, but don't understand the underlying mechanisms, and don't have any conveniently testable anomalies to investigate. We have galactic rotation curves, universal expansion, etc. to give us hints, but we can't exactly tinker with things at that scale to see what happens. We have Dark Matter and Energy as potential explanations, and we are trying to confirm their existence and nature independently - but that's ferociously expensive research. We've only just (probably) discovered the Higgs boson, confirmation of the Higgs field, theoretical key to the existence of inertial mass - and we may one day figure out how to harness the Higgs field to allow inertial dampeners or other such incredibly handy tools - but we can't exactly sit down with a jar full of Higgs and start tinkering - just producing the things is enormously expensive, and they last infinitesimal amount of time, making any experiments extremely difficult and costly.
The problem is not so much that we lack the intelligence and creativity - but that we're running out of esoteric anomalies to investigate, and the ones we have are extremely difficult and expensive to investigate, so that intelligence and creativity is useless without also having vast amounts of wealth. Brilliance is great and all, but it needs something to work with - esoteric anomalies in the behavior of the universe.
And then of course, there's putting new discoveries to work - that's a completely separate field, and wholly dependent on the "useless" research for new tools to work with. Inventors can't work on developing antigrav drives, because we have no physics to even hint that it's possible. What are you going to do, just start building random shit in your garage and hope something magically works?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
I'm not getting as much bang for the buck anymore either... when did prostitutes get so expensive?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Just curious. What is the going rate per word for anti-climate-science disinformation?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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 /. :-)
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.
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.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I meant to say "one of the top 2 or existential threats".
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.
Maybe we're nearing the end of the road. Of course, people were saying that right before radioactivity was discovered.
being done and breakthroughs have been made, but they acre Classified, as in Top Secret. The research won't see the light of day.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
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.
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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/...
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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.
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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.
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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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The law of bug fixing strikes again?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
cuts into actually making progress.
Telomere regeneration happens naturally in the body, with telomerase.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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).
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Physics is over, but they laugh ot me as if I am some kind of Lord Kelvin
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
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?...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
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.
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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.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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
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.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I had somehow missed that very important detail. Thanks.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.