Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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.
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
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.
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.
A theory is, in essence, a very high level pattern that you've discovered in observations.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
Telomere regeneration happens naturally in the body, with telomerase.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.