Science is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck (theatlantic.com) 248
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.
String Theory (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:String Theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah. String theory has as much to do with it as the flying spaghetti monster.
The pace of discovery is slowing because of the law of diminishing returns. We already picked the low hanging fruit. Now each incremental advance gets more and more expensive, and the number of significant breakthrough "leaps" get fewer and farther between. Same as everything else. Cars, circuits, razors, microwave ovens. Each advance is increasingly more complex and costly than the last.
The reason astronomy has made so much progress lately is because the tools are so improved. Space telescopes, instantaneous global coordination of observatories, adaptive optics... these things didn't exist 30 years ago. We have access to reams more data now than ever before. Astronomy is still in its infancy in terms of data collection capabilities.
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This is only true for the assumption that the difficulty of remaining discoveries, as expressed by the resources needed, exceeds the increase in resources we've thrown at the problem.
That appears to be the case, and it seems like the right answer, but
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We are stuck on this rock till the Sun blows us up, and that's it.
I don't know why I care--I'll be long gone--but I like to think there's a slight probability that a lucky (maybe!) few humans leave on generational ships.
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Each advance is increasingly more complex and costly than the last.
Yes, this. And here is proof. The Michelson-Morley experiment which proved the ether didn't exist was a few meters in size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
LIGO (for detecting gravitational waves) is essentially the exact same thing, just 1000x bigger.
Of course it costs more and is vastly more complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Besides, comparing Nobel prizes says more about the Nobel committee than it says about science. They have awarded far too many prizes to supraconductors and solid state phy
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Much of economics is BS because it is interwoven with politics, which corrupts economics.
Some economic results are counter-intuitive, and were not known in antiquity. David Ricardo's 1817 analysis of comparative advantage is an obvious example.
Modern advances in mathematics and computers both have allowed economists to tease principles out of raw data, which would not have been possible 2000 years ago.
Re:String Theory (Score:4, Funny)
OTOH, there's been tremendous progress in cosmology in the past 20 years
Yep the cosmology community has gotten much better at coming up with bad candidates for dark matter / dark energy. Real shame they are playing trial and error with literally an entire universe of candidates.
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Yep the cosmology community has gotten much better at coming up with bad candidates for dark matter / dark energy.
Not to mention discovering them i the first place, which wasn't that long ago. Confirmation of dark matter as some kind of slower-than-light particle only came in 2010 with the WMAP [wikipedia.org] CMBR data. For the first time ever we've had cosmology with significant digits!
There has also been a ton of work on inflation theories, but that can't go much farther without a new way of looking at the universe. Discovering how to make a neutrino observatory would be revolutionary (but likely still not interest the Nobel comm
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You're just wrong on that one. We know it's there for sure. We just don't know what it is, beyond "matter particles, not moving at c". All theories of modified gravity and large dark objects (back holes, brown dwarfs) were falsified by the CMBR data. Whatever dark matter is, it was there in the early universe, in the same proportions as today, interacting with familiar matter only by gravity.
Re: String Theory (Score:2)
Nothing to show for it?
We have five different beyond standard model theories because of it.
We have three different methods of falsifying string theory.
We have a deeper understanding of what must be true regardless of how things progress beyond the standard model.
We have a working understanding of the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
We have a better grasp of how different models of QM manifest in broader physics.
We understand what unifying forces actually means.
You call that nothing?
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Not even wrong.
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Your sig? Agreed.
My post? It's fine, which is why you're limited to harassing people who hold different politics, via fallacy by assertion.
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If you think that is an accomplishment, rather than a knock against the whole "landscape", you are not a "persuadable".
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Egh. You could argue that people who got dragged into that dead-end were no "talents" to begin with. Maybe the 30-year draught in fundamental physics research was meant to be, whether Witten came along or not.
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No, all the talent is working for investment banks. Why research physics when you can get payed ten times as much elsewhere?
This actually sounds very plausible, especially as the USA has been the world centre of research since WW2. The US culture is almost uniquely focused on money, so many intelligent young people naturally gravitate to finance instead of science or engineering.
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Both of which were predicted before 1980s. We have a draught in physics theory results.
It would have been far more interesting if we never detected gravitational waves (would mean something is wrong with Einstein's general relativity), or if we never detected Higgs boson (would mean there is something fundamentally and structurally wrong with the standard mode
who wrote this (Score:2)
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Simple: Write it down. That elevates it above all the yet undiscovered theories, which are almost all wrong and uninteresting anyways.
it's easy... (Score:2)
Well, it's easy if you know where to look.
That being said, however, just the other day I found a theory under my couch.
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How does someone 'discover' a theory?
They don't. It's an invention the exact same as a motor or an LED. The mental processes and actions are exactly the same. Only philosophers know the difference, but they don't, because an invented motor is just a proof of a motor theory "discovered".
Contrary to philosophy, it's all invention.
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I dinosaur it thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, than thin again at the other end...
Para: Miss Anne Elk discussing her new theory (that is her's).
Re:who wrote this (Score:4, Interesting)
A theory is, in essence, a very high level pattern that you've discovered in observations.
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How does someone 'discover' a theory?
Simple: just do a lot of reading in the Library of Babel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: who wrote this (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Nothing "went wrong"... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The fact of the matter is that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and things are getting harder.
Not just getting harder, but more expensive. The major discoveries made at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century were "cheap." Now in order to explore the nature of reality even further, it often requires that millions if not billions of dollars be spent to build specialty equipment in order to verify findings.
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Not just getting harder, but more expensive. The major discoveries made at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th century were "cheap." Now in order to explore the nature of reality even further, it often requires that millions if not billions of dollars be spent to build specialty equipment in order to verify findings.
Reminds me of an article or a youtube vid (I can't immediately what and where) which described big discoveries by individuals in 19th century and early 20th century but in more recent times a collection of people (one has an idea but another got the money to demonstrate it). Or maybe using a real estate analogy, kind of like in 1890 when the Census Dept declared the frontier is closed (all properties in the west US have been settled)?
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Here's the thing about picking low-hanging fruit; eventually the tree bears more low-hanging fruit. The golden age of physics discoveries in the early-to-mid 20th century corresponds with the aftermath of the introduction of quantum mechanics and relativity, and we're still working out the consequences of that.
A single field like physics goes through periods of disruption followed by a long and productive (although less glamorous) aftermath, so you can't judge productivity in science as a whole by a brief
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"Publish or perish" is one of the root-causes of meaningless but spectacular "research". It is about the most stupid policy you can have.
That's good, right ? (Score:2)
You would expect to see fewer and fewer big discoveries as we get closer to understanding nature.
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You would expect to see fewer and fewer big discoveries as we get closer to understanding nature.
It depends on how you look at it. To use a puzzle as an analogy the closer you get to the end the faster the remaining pieces come together. Perhaps we are more akin to having gotten the border done and now have the harder task of filling in the middle.
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Scientists aren't what they used to be. (Score:2)
Scientists used to be aware of multiple disciplines, and kept abreast of all developments roughly pertaining to their fields.
Now, all knowledge is locked away behind paywalls, expensive degrees that deport no real knowledge of a subject, and arrogance instead of cooperation.
No one wants to work with other people, because it just shows up how little they actually know; you can BS your boss, but the guy who actually know something see your real self.
As a Tech, I trained engineers who didn't know what a resist
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Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Is this fault of people failing to read or is it the fault of too much information now? It's been said the medical field has hidden discoveries lying around all over the place in previous studies but due to the quantity of research being done now, its becoming more challenging for researchers to stay caught up anything other than their own small field.
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Re:Scientists aren't what they used to be. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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, p
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One of my best inventions was a current mirror and current ladder design I took out of a 1950's transistor databook.
It was Ge based transistors, and transferring the concept to 500V sot-23 transistors was straightforward.
Everyone in my group wanted to patent it, and I showed them the book, with the Quote "Everything old is new again."
They thought reusing an old concept was dirty somehow, lol.
It controlled a 1300V bias voltage with 0.01% accuracy, which did not work any other way; the transistors were arrang
Nice post. (Score:2)
I like your site. :)
I'd like to do that, but most of the stuff I invent belongs to the corporation. :(
I designed and built a 300A fan driver on my time for a hobby application, and they wanted it, lol.
I can be evil, tho; I convinced a colleague that he could make a photon detector more sensitive by using a driven population inversion to amplify single photons. :) (random noise is a problem... :D ) We were drinking at Hooters at the time, lol.
He did try to patent it, before he got the joke.
I like the anecdot
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More accurately, to get to the forefront of any field takes years, and even then you must be positioned properly with the leading lights of that field. Marrying more than one field is laudable but laughable, there's not enough life time. And that doesn't get you there quite yet. You need funding because all the easy stuff has been done. And your funding better be stable over the years it will take you to produce something new in your field.
Stable funding over years, something companies run by bean counters
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You're not even wrong.
Leibniz obviously won, and the argument was long after people were using calculus. We still use his notation.
It's easy to dismiss someone who know how to do things; I still think of myself as a Tech, to distinguish myself from someone who merely thinks.
I actually build things.
A scientist is someone who uses Scientific principles; my various degrees have nothing to do with it at all.
All anecdotes are personal; how could it be any different?
A degree is easy to get, but I started with my
Ugh (Score:2)
The way the Nobel committee makes decisions has changed over time, and varies by field. Today the science prizes are awarded only after a long time has gone by and the discovery is so well validated that it's nearly impossible there's a mistake.
To say nothing about how dumb it is to try and gauge scientific production by looking at Nobel prizes.
bureaucratic needs (Score:2)
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
Exponentially more difficult (Score:2)
No surprise really. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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>The electron is more important than some quark or higgs boson or whatever.
Are you sure? It is today, but electricity was widely considered to be a useless novelty for a very long time after it's discovery (which was long before the discovery of the electron as the charge carrier). Then we learned how to manipulate them in novel ways - first for things like lights and motors and crude calculating devices, and then, with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, via the diodes and transistors that are the bas
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You lack imagination.
WTF...spelling words ONE way? Boring.
Posthumous null effect (Score:2, Informative)
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.
No shit, Sherlock (Score:3)
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... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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How about doing something proactive, instead of just pointing out the problem after they've already wasted time that could have been spent doing something more valuable? Start putting those old papers online, so that younger researchers can easily learn from them, rather than leaving them hidden in an unlit stairless cellar in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'.
The problem there is paywalls (Score:2)
That should be written into the funding grants.
And it's time to make that retroactive.
The needless, wasteful wheel-reinventing you are describing is the result of highway-robbery on the part of old school journal publishing companies.
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I refuse to do peer review; I have yet to see a paper that was worth the effort used to make it.
The last one I was asked to do was by a distant colleagues son; it was twaddle, so I took his name off it and sent it to his uncle, who was in the field, asking what he thought of it. :)
I sent the uncles review directly to the guy that wrote the paper, and they never asked again. (It was a devastating review, and he knew immediately that I didn't write it, due to some easy errors.)
It's becoming a closed system, a
The low hanging fruit have all been picked (Score:3)
I don't think it is the science but the funding. (Score:3)
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.
Knowledge is not a river (Score:2)
It's a delta. With each discovery, new paths of research and exploration fork off from it and recombine. Learning how briskly rubbing hard and softwood together in a certain way to produce fire was civilization altering, but I doubt it was cheap knowledge to come by. When yours and your family's survival depends upon spending every waking minute looking for food and you jagging around rubbing sticks together... But, look at what spun off from that in every way imaginable. Look at what it enabled, and t
The low hanging fruit has been picked. (Score:2)
Welcome back to drudgedot (Score:2)
Oldie Goldies (Score:3)
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.
Ain't everything. (Score:2)
Not Like For Like (Score:2)
We are now living in what many people refer to as "The Information Age" - i.e. one in which knowledge has intrinsic value.
Much more importantly, we are also living in a much wealthier age, one in which there are no shortage of Venture Capital firms, VC funds and
It's not just science (Score:2)
The sphere of ignorance (Score:2)
Knowledge is best represented as a sphere contained inside a larger sphere representing the things we know we don't know. This, in turn, is inside an infinite hypercube of the things we don't know we don't know.
To double how much you understand requires more and more effort. The volume of knowledge needed to achieve a level of understanding goes up with the cube of the understanding, in this model.
This ignores the loss to the system caused by entropy, otherwise known as inflation. Things get more expensive
Low hanging fruit (Score:2)
Modern science didn't really get going until maybe the 1600s or 1700s. There was lots of low hanging fruit to discover that could be understood with the relatively crude instrumentation of the time (although good thermometers have been available for about 300 years). Nowadays we're getting more into the details and there are fewer and fewer fundamental things to discover, just things built on those fundamentals. It's like the development of the airplane. Once the Wright brothers got their airplane flyin
Need a new thang (Score:2)
There is planety of cutting-edge research (Score:2)
being done and breakthroughs have been made, but they acre Classified, as in Top Secret. The research won't see the light of day.
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Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Perhaps you meant bypass, rather than defeat? Or perhaps you merely meant a cost effective way of generating enough energy and opposing force to defeat gravity?
Telomere regeneration is another thing. As I understand it, Telomere regeneration isn't even proven to be worth doing at all, its proposed positive effects are a myth. It is just one of ma
Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll (Score:3)
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Not really - he just clarified the mechanism.
Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll (Score:5, Interesting)
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/... [wikipedia.org]
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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.
Not only were many scientists independent, many of the greatest discoveries were discovered by accident or happenstance. Being versed in multiple sciences and knowing when something is unusual helps too. If you're siloed and paid for doing a specific thing you are less likely to follow an interesting tangent.
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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.
Even aerospace offers examples of this. In the early days of aviation, crazy inventors monkeyed with aircraft and rockets, making fast early gains. Then aerospace became institutionalized, with fast progress possible only in wartime. JFK was canny enough to slip through Apollo as a Cold War project, butt after that manned space programs languished - until wild-hair individual billionaires got back into the game. Suddenly, space programs are leaping ahead again.
Low hanging fruit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 recaptur
Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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In science there are periods when there's a sudden opening of a field to new ideas, where some breakthroughs will change perceptions of what can be discovered. After that point there's a rush to explore what's possible and then followed again by settling down and filling in the finer details. We had that sort of period in in the early 1900s, we started understanding electromagnetic fields, we had general relativity, and at the same time we also had an advance in technology to be able to explore more. You c
Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll (Score:2)
They weren't free. They each probably cost the equivalent of all research in the 20th and 21st centuries combined.
Not that I'd expect those ignorant of prehistory to know that.
And climate research has cost very, very little, but turned up a lot for what was spent.
Of course, those ignorant of what the research has involved or discovered are likely to be ignorant of the cost:benefit ratios.
Re:Most bang for the buck ever poll (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I meant to say "one of the top 2 or existential threats".
Re: Most bang for the buck ever poll (Score:2)
You'll learn.
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It even notes the rate remains similar, just that it's costing more.
This is nothing unexpected [juliansimon.com], and in an economically free society, people can actually keep ahead of the curve, inventing faster and faster and solving problems faster than they become long-term problems.
In short, the OP statement about less bang for its buck is accurate, but the wrong way to look at it.
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Re:Gravitational Waves (Score:4, Insightful)
Hi there, oil industry shill (Score:2)
So if we suggest that funding-source creates bias, we should statistically expect 100s or 1000s of times as many biased statements coming out against the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as for it.
Enjoy the proceeds of evil. Oil is not evil. Continuing to say it's not causing a m
industry shill (Score:2)
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Were they first produced today, Einstein's early defining works would go straight into the crackpot file (recall that he was working as a patent clerk when he submitted his four groundbreaking papers, which included special relativity and E=MC2).
The barriers to acceptance you complain about have always been part of science. Einstein's initial ideas WERE initially dismissed, specifically because they were so unconventional and because he had no credentials. The thing is, though, his ideas were RIGHT, so eventually the physics community came around and accepted his theories.
This is because so many of the older physicists, who are string theory adherents, are the ones controlling entry into their field. It also takes a pretty big man (or woman) to admit they've devoted their career to barking up the wrong tree.
Also not new. As Planck said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually