I would put forth three lines of argument that might help.
First, what we consider a significant development is put in relation to its context. So, we naturally end up picking out the top-level entities and not the second-layer entities, let alone the third, fourth, fifth… modern science may have the same number of top-level discoveries, but these are underpinned by many more layers of discovery than earlier discoveries.
Second, let’s stop thinking about the jump from Aristotle to modern science for a minute. Let’s think about the jump from Novoselov and Geim’s discovery of Graphene to today.
In their first paper, they made graphene, put it on a substrate, hooked a few wires up to it, and did low-temperature transport measurements. Worth a nobel prize. Outside of the insight that led to it, pretty simple. Not everyone could do it, but many could.
In the following years, a bunch of progressively trickier experiments were performed.
As of two years ago, our clearest path to a publishable research paper in this area was to make an enormous pristine sheet of graphene, position a layer of boron nitride on top of it, position another layer of graphene on top of that in such a way that it didn’t short to the first piece, place a bunch of wires in very specific locations on this sandwich, then destroy the substrate that was all sitting on, all done so cleanly that it was smooth on every surface. This was insanely hard. This is also only a little trickier than normal for experiments in the field these days.
The low-hanging fruit has been taken, here. And it’s not simply that other people took it and we’re looking at sour grapes. I took some of that low-hanging fruit. There was a simple experiment to do, I did it, published it, and now I cannot do an experiment that simple again in this sub-field. My next experiment was substantially more complicated. The next experiment after that was far more complicated still.
Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but we are in a progressively rarer atmosphere.
Third, and most critically, let’s look at the predictions of the ‘organizational inefficiency’ theory. if we were to scale back our scientific establishment to 1700-s levels, do you think we’d maintain our current level of scientific progress? That seems to be the implication, here, and it seems VERY dubious to me.
I would put forth three lines of argument that might help.
First, what we consider a significant development is put in relation to its context. So, we naturally end up picking out the top-level entities and not the second-layer entities, let alone the third, fourth, fifth… modern science may have the same number of top-level discoveries, but these are underpinned by many more layers of discovery than earlier discoveries.
Second, let’s stop thinking about the jump from Aristotle to modern science for a minute. Let’s think about the jump from Novoselov and Geim’s discovery of Graphene to today.
In their first paper, they made graphene, put it on a substrate, hooked a few wires up to it, and did low-temperature transport measurements. Worth a nobel prize. Outside of the insight that led to it, pretty simple. Not everyone could do it, but many could.
In the following years, a bunch of progressively trickier experiments were performed.
As of two years ago, our clearest path to a publishable research paper in this area was to make an enormous pristine sheet of graphene, position a layer of boron nitride on top of it, position another layer of graphene on top of that in such a way that it didn’t short to the first piece, place a bunch of wires in very specific locations on this sandwich, then destroy the substrate that was all sitting on, all done so cleanly that it was smooth on every surface. This was insanely hard. This is also only a little trickier than normal for experiments in the field these days.
The low-hanging fruit has been taken, here. And it’s not simply that other people took it and we’re looking at sour grapes. I took some of that low-hanging fruit. There was a simple experiment to do, I did it, published it, and now I cannot do an experiment that simple again in this sub-field. My next experiment was substantially more complicated. The next experiment after that was far more complicated still.
Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, but we are in a progressively rarer atmosphere.
Third, and most critically, let’s look at the predictions of the ‘organizational inefficiency’ theory. if we were to scale back our scientific establishment to 1700-s levels, do you think we’d maintain our current level of scientific progress? That seems to be the implication, here, and it seems VERY dubious to me.