What I’ve learned after years in the field is that what most scientists really want to do is prove how smart they are, and that this is a big reason why science is so unproductive today.
Implied premise here is that science is unproductive today. In physics we’ve found the Higgs boson. In math, we’ve proven the fundamental lemma of the Langlands program). In astronomy, we’ve found multiplanet star systems. In quantum computing, we’ve made major progress in practical implementation of factoring algorithms. This is all in the last three years and is essentially off the top of my head. Given that, the claim that science is “so unproductive” today seems at minimum to be a claim which shouldn’t be made without some evidence to support it.
Yes, that’s an important issue certainly. To some extent, scientific and engineering progress clearly feels slower than it seems to have been historically. We don’t have frequent things like the theory of evolution showing up now. But when phrased that way, it seems that much of the slow down is simply that we’ve picked off the low-hanging fruit. We have a pretty good understanding of basic physics and biology today, so the remaining discoveries will be necessarily more incremental.
If you compare the money and manpower put into science today, to fifty and 100 and 150 years ago, you will be astonished at the reduction in productivity.
Probably not. I’ve wrote about how in some respects we are less productive now than we were 100 years ago, although that was in the context of technological, not scientific development. But what your metric is matters a lot in this context. For example, the number of published papers in many fields has been increasing, but many of those papers are complete wastes. I don’ t know a good way to measure that. If your timeperiod to compare is that far back, then I’m almost more concerned about how you know what the cause is of a drop in productivity than anything else. In particular, how one can tell that this isn’t just the low-hanging fruit problem mentioned earlier.
I didn’t say that it wasn’t the low-hanging fruit problem. That is probably part of the problem. I don’t think it’s the biggest part. The biggest part of the problem, IMHO, isn’t anything that anyone did wrong; it’s that scientific output is inherently proportional to the log of resources spent. This is the low-hanging fruit problem when you’re talking about equipment cost in high-energy physics, but it’s the search problem when you’re talking about many other fields.
So how would you distinguish between the different causes and how much it is one cause or another? If for example, much of the problem is low hanging fruit then one would expect that the overall scientific productivity level would in some sense slow down over time. If most of it is the sort of systemic issues you are discussing what observations could we make to test the claim?
I have a lot of evidence. On a per-dollar basis, science today is many orders of magnitude less productive than it was a century ago. I have a paper in draft I can email you.
On a per-dollar basis, science today is many orders of magnitude less productive than it was a century ago. I have a paper in draft I can email you.
Frankly, a draft of that paper would be far more interesting than this post itself. I’m curious what your metric is. Denominators is dollars, and numerator is what?
Email my username at gmail.com, and I’ll send it to you.
ADDED: Now online here. Please leave comments there if you have any. It looks like you can’t do line-by-line comments on a Word document in google docs, though.
Alternatively, scientific problems might have got a lot harder! Compare the sheer amount of maths needed to understand quantum mechanics compared to something like gravitation.
(and I’m assuming you’re taking into account inflation etc.)
Implied premise here is that science is unproductive today. In physics we’ve found the Higgs boson. In math, we’ve proven the fundamental lemma of the Langlands program). In astronomy, we’ve found multiplanet star systems. In quantum computing, we’ve made major progress in practical implementation of factoring algorithms. This is all in the last three years and is essentially off the top of my head. Given that, the claim that science is “so unproductive” today seems at minimum to be a claim which shouldn’t be made without some evidence to support it.
As always, relative to what?
Yes, that’s an important issue certainly. To some extent, scientific and engineering progress clearly feels slower than it seems to have been historically. We don’t have frequent things like the theory of evolution showing up now. But when phrased that way, it seems that much of the slow down is simply that we’ve picked off the low-hanging fruit. We have a pretty good understanding of basic physics and biology today, so the remaining discoveries will be necessarily more incremental.
I’m more interested in prospective comparisons than retrospective comparions.
If you compare the money and manpower put into science today, to fifty and 100 and 150 years ago, you will be astonished at the reduction in productivity.
Probably not. I’ve wrote about how in some respects we are less productive now than we were 100 years ago, although that was in the context of technological, not scientific development. But what your metric is matters a lot in this context. For example, the number of published papers in many fields has been increasing, but many of those papers are complete wastes. I don’ t know a good way to measure that. If your timeperiod to compare is that far back, then I’m almost more concerned about how you know what the cause is of a drop in productivity than anything else. In particular, how one can tell that this isn’t just the low-hanging fruit problem mentioned earlier.
I didn’t say that it wasn’t the low-hanging fruit problem. That is probably part of the problem. I don’t think it’s the biggest part. The biggest part of the problem, IMHO, isn’t anything that anyone did wrong; it’s that scientific output is inherently proportional to the log of resources spent. This is the low-hanging fruit problem when you’re talking about equipment cost in high-energy physics, but it’s the search problem when you’re talking about many other fields.
So how would you distinguish between the different causes and how much it is one cause or another? If for example, much of the problem is low hanging fruit then one would expect that the overall scientific productivity level would in some sense slow down over time. If most of it is the sort of systemic issues you are discussing what observations could we make to test the claim?
I have a lot of evidence. On a per-dollar basis, science today is many orders of magnitude less productive than it was a century ago. I have a paper in draft I can email you.
Frankly, a draft of that paper would be far more interesting than this post itself. I’m curious what your metric is. Denominators is dollars, and numerator is what?
Email my username at gmail.com, and I’ll send it to you.
ADDED: Now online here. Please leave comments there if you have any. It looks like you can’t do line-by-line comments on a Word document in google docs, though.
Done.
Alternatively, scientific problems might have got a lot harder! Compare the sheer amount of maths needed to understand quantum mechanics compared to something like gravitation.
(and I’m assuming you’re taking into account inflation etc.)
As far as I know, general relativity isn’t any mathematically simpler than quantum mechanics is.
I think in context bryjnar meant simply Newtonian gravity.
Yep.
You ought to compare it to quantum field theory, not to non-relativistic quantum mechanics.