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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.
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!