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Message Subject Why scientific study is so slow today
Poster Handle Anonymous Coward
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I'm a professional physicist, so I'd like to make a few comments.

First of all, scientific research has never been as rapid as it is today. If you think back to the days of Newton or ancient Greeks, you maybe got a real breakthrough in a generation. Now we get breakthroughs in fundamental science on a monthly basis.

The reason why it seems slow is that the everyday applications of the scientific research lag behind. All the wonderful nanoscience I see in our lab will probably be available in ten or so years. Science is so far ahead of engineering and, for instance, materials processing that creating affordable applications based on new discoveries takes ages. Military is often the first adopter, because the cost is really not an issue and the production volume may be low. Then come the huge corporations and only much later the consumer grade products start appearing.

Secondly, science is so fragmented and focused on narrow areas that it is difficult to keep track of all that's going on. All the ingredients for the cure of cancer, theory of everything or true artificial intelligence may already be there, but there is so much information that it's impossible to see the woods from the trees.

Having more scientists (professional or amateur) will not help. In fact, since we're already drowning in scientific information, having more people publishing new results will only make the information congestion worse.

On the other hand, a true scientific singularity could happen, if someone created a true artificial intelligence that could rapidly shift through our vast scientific archives and draw its own conclusions. What we really need now is an efficient way of merging the existing fragmented information into more generic theories and applications.
 Quoting: Anonymous Coward 28128834


BS about "never as rapid as today". Last major breakthrough was high-T superconductance in 1988. Nothin after and don't tell me anything about "graphene" etc. - whilst not all BS it is not on the same scale. Best period of discoveries was between 1905-1970 or so.
 
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