As science progresses, it unlocks engineering possibilities combinatorially. This induces demand for and creates a supply of a healthier/more educated population with a larger number of researchers, many of whom are employed in building and managing our infrastructure rather than finding seminal ideas.
So what we’re witnessing isn’t scientific innovations becoming harder to find. Instead, scientific innovations produce so many engineering opportunities that they induce demand for an enormous number of engineers. The result is that an ever-decreasing fraction of the population is working in science, and science has to compete with an ever-larger and more lucrative engineering industry to attract the best and brightest.
In support of this, notice that the decline you find in scientific progress roughly begins in the early days of the industrial revolution (mid-late 1700s).
On top of that, I think we have to consider the tech-tree narrative of science history writing. Do you imagine that, even if you’d found that science today was becoming apparently more efficient relative to effective population, that scientific history writers would say “we’re going to have to cut out some of those Enlightenment figures to make room for all this amazing stuff going on in biotech!”?
It’s not that historians are biased in favor of the past, and give short shrift to the greatness of modern science and technology. It’s that their approach to historiography is one of tracing the development of ideas over time.
Page limits are page limits, and they’re not going to compress the past indefinitely in order to give adequate room for the present. They’re writing histories, after all. The end result, though, is that Murray’s sources will simply run out of room to cover modern science in the depth it deserves. This isn’t about “bad taste,” but about page limits and historiographical traditions.
These two forces explain both the numerator and the denominator in your charts of scientific efficiency.
This isn’t a story of bias, decline, or “peak science.” It’s a story of how ever-accelerating investment in engineering, along with histories written to educate about the history of ideas rather than to make a time-neutral quantification of eminence, combine to give a superficial impression of stagnation.
If anything, under this thesis, scientific progress and the academy is suffering precisely because of the perception you’re articulating here. The excitement and lucre associated with industry steers investment and talent away from investment in basic academic science. The faster this happens, the more stagnant the university looks as an ever-larger fraction of technical progress (including both engineering and science) happens outside the academy. And the world eats its seedcorn.
As science progresses, it unlocks engineering possibilities combinatorially. This induces demand for and creates a supply of a healthier/more educated population with a larger number of researchers, many of whom are employed in building and managing our infrastructure rather than finding seminal ideas.
So what we’re witnessing isn’t scientific innovations becoming harder to find. Instead, scientific innovations produce so many engineering opportunities that they induce demand for an enormous number of engineers. The result is that an ever-decreasing fraction of the population is working in science, and science has to compete with an ever-larger and more lucrative engineering industry to attract the best and brightest.
In support of this, notice that the decline you find in scientific progress roughly begins in the early days of the industrial revolution (mid-late 1700s).
On top of that, I think we have to consider the tech-tree narrative of science history writing. Do you imagine that, even if you’d found that science today was becoming apparently more efficient relative to effective population, that scientific history writers would say “we’re going to have to cut out some of those Enlightenment figures to make room for all this amazing stuff going on in biotech!”?
It’s not that historians are biased in favor of the past, and give short shrift to the greatness of modern science and technology. It’s that their approach to historiography is one of tracing the development of ideas over time.
Page limits are page limits, and they’re not going to compress the past indefinitely in order to give adequate room for the present. They’re writing histories, after all. The end result, though, is that Murray’s sources will simply run out of room to cover modern science in the depth it deserves. This isn’t about “bad taste,” but about page limits and historiographical traditions.
These two forces explain both the numerator and the denominator in your charts of scientific efficiency.
This isn’t a story of bias, decline, or “peak science.” It’s a story of how ever-accelerating investment in engineering, along with histories written to educate about the history of ideas rather than to make a time-neutral quantification of eminence, combine to give a superficial impression of stagnation.
If anything, under this thesis, scientific progress and the academy is suffering precisely because of the perception you’re articulating here. The excitement and lucre associated with industry steers investment and talent away from investment in basic academic science. The faster this happens, the more stagnant the university looks as an ever-larger fraction of technical progress (including both engineering and science) happens outside the academy. And the world eats its seedcorn.