Science is slowing down because scientists write papers and papers and more papers, not to achieve scientifical progress, but to achieve a better university-ranking.

We succesfully created a system encourages mediocrity and discourages novelty.

The big problem here is a significant shift in funding towards marketable products and ideas. A perfect example, the CSIRO (commonwealth science and research organization) was doing hard research into black holes when they developed wifi (Fourier transformation technique). That same organization has now had a total shift to 'work with and support industry' and would never have made that same breakthrough with their current focus and funding focus. It's why we have better things but less actual scientific innovation. Same thing is happening across the research sector.

science without the philosophy of science made it not much of a warm environment for thinkers. When you look at most of the best scientists, they were very good at philosophy, reasoning and formal logic. The separation of sciences has really played its role, hindering the creation of polymaths

another hypothesis is we've picked most of the low hanging fruit. it only gets harder from here.

Former researcher here. You get funding for publishing tons of paper and sticking to the status quo. If you challenge the status quo without very powerful backing, you don’t get funding and your career dies. Speaking as someone who had a paper killed by by Michel Mayor because the results threatened funding for the espresso spectrograph. I was right though

As I am currently in the center of the paper treadmill in electrochemistry, I am not surprised. As a PhD, you try to get things working that your big boss has barely thought about for 10 minutes, and then they insist it has to work with their materials, just because of their ego. I am actively sabotaged to work on something that is truly competitive or new because it only should work with our stuff. Obviously, it doesn't, and you try to find workarounds to get your damned papers published and this stories are never groundbreaking. And yes of course it's getting harder to find something. 1906 you can get a noble price for the isolation of fluorine. It's not that easy these days.

Reminds me of the stagnation in popular music, art and fashion - my take: creativity requires being mentally 'off the grid' for some time, reduced media consumption, long walks and long showers. Groundbreaking ideas can neither be forced nor planned. They come, when the mind is in a dream-like, distracted state. Of course, you have to burden your memory with a lot of very specific factual and conceptual information first. And you need enough sleep.

As a young scientist struggling to survive in science, I can point to three things that are killing it: - publish or perish, that is, quantity is more important than quality! - most scientists are underpaid and very overworked, specially in academia. - The bloated ego of many "top scientists" makes it impossible to work with them, hence the transfer of experience and knowledge between different generations of scientists is greatly hampered.

In my postdoctoral experience in theoretical evolutionary biology, it seems like science is often driven by ego, especially among senior investigators, who would rather be "right" than know the truth.

Basically, making science nowadays is more effective if you are the DIY-superman and you are not interested in getting any funds from anybody. My friends from Wrocław city salvaged tons of equipment from trash and bankrupt companies, scavenging what they can, eventually they even aqquired 30yo electrone microscope on a junkyard, refurbished it and now they're gonna start their own research. Writing scientific papers is waste of time - it's better to have youtube channel nowadays, gather small community of interested people and publish one bonkers paper every few years.

As an independent researcher so far I paid my own research, and conference fees. In a course of 20 years I witnessed increase in prices of everything related to research, and simultaneously the increase in pressure to publish. It all boils down to the only people publishing papers are those in the business of printing papers that can afford it. Naturally, instead of two groundbreaking ideas being published in a single paper, a single publishable idea is being published in many conferences.

I work in the biomedical industry or at least I am trying to. The problem in my field is 3 fold: 1. innovative thinkers are punished and excommunicated from the field, 2. scammers game the system and have the appearance of productivity and lots of papers that are either redundant/obsolete, falsified, or side details rather than useful for breakthroughs, 3. dishonesty when raising capital poisoning the well for people with good ideas that are feasible and valuable.

I just left academia after a PhD, I think another part of it is that, at least in ecology, research councils aren't in the habit of funding work that could be groundbreaking as they view it as too risky/ a high likelihood of wasted money. Calls for funding are often highly tied to something we already know a lot about and applying it to a different scale or location.

When everyone's got a Masters = nobody's got a Masters.

Something else worth mentioning is that the farther the field progresses, the more challenging it becomes to 'catch up' to the state of the art and make contributions

As an ex-academic, my vote is for option 3. The publication industry coupled with managerialism have established a set of incentives for scientists that align poorly with discovery and knowledge generation. Amusingly, there were a number of social science papers published in the 70s (i think) that predicted this... And here we are.

Born too early for space exploration, born too late for exciting scientific breakthrough, born at right time to enjoy meme.

I'm just a small mechanical engineer, not a scientist, but I noticed something similar in my field. My observation is that many oldtimers lived the evolution from handdrawing to CAD-design, which was a phenomenal tool for them. But the new generation gets tought the new tools and the foundation only in theory. The difference in the result couldn't be more stark! It gives me a strong feeling, that they don't really understand why they are doing things the way they were tought to do them. They fully live in their abstract layer.

Great video! I wish there was a bit of a deeper dive into the reasons why we're observing these findings in the first place.

I spent my career in an R&D environment. One of the key things that happened over the last 20 years is the change from basic research to applied research. Applied meaning it has a specific product in mind vs achieving basic understanding. I've even had other scientists argue that only applied research should be funded. In my organization they used to be managed by technical people who moved up. Around 2005 they changed the promotion path and specifically limited the level a technical person could reach while creating specific management tracks to reach upper levels. This caused more and more of the senior decision makers to have zero knowledge of what we actually did and to focus more and more on short term financial measures than long term research and game changing output. Compared to the 60s and 70s the number of papers our organization produced greatly decreased but also the content changed from technical scientific content to more of a "look at how great we are" marketing content.

I think back to my PhD mentor. He had a ton of grants and won a bunch of awards because his h-index was very high for his age and it was growing fast. But what exactly did he do to be so highly cited? Well he collaborated with other high impact labs and got his names on their papers. And many of those labs were massive 100 person research groups that cited their own papers highly. So in reality, most of his exceptional KPIs were hollow. But he still got loads of money to do research. He was very good at "the game", the business of being a researcher. But he spent little of his time studying papers extensively and being an expert in a particular field. You need fewer generalists, businessmen and more nerds who are obsessed with a particular subject and dedicate their lives to it. Its becoming harder to be an expert in a small field and easier to be a generalist/networker to attain the KPIs. The remedy in my opinion starts by getting over the obsession with publishing in huge journals like Nature, Science, Cell, etc. It should be very rewarding to do rock solid, reproducible research on a niche topic and to publish in "lower impact" but more focused journals.

Interesting topic. Thanks, Sabine!

I'm happy more and more people are finally talking about this technological stagnation issue. If you look around most rooms and take the screens out, we are mostly back in the 1970s except for some design choices. Also if you look at a picture of the world in 1920 and a picture of the world in 1970, You can see a lot has changed over that 50 year period. Meanwhile, if you look at the differences between 1970 and 2020 not as much changed, except for in the digital world. This issue is so underrated and probably the most important issue of our time. Also, I think culture should be considered as a possible reason we have this problem.

'Publish or perish' forced many researchers to focus on 'easy science'. Why push forward on a risky venture with little hope of success, when there are any number of simpler paths to take? I saw this at University; workers slavishly duplicating historical experiments with no real change in the set-up, procedures or conclusions. "We did the thing that other people did, the same way they did it. We got the same results, so we know we did it right. Here is our article, publish please." Maybe this was unique to Psychology research?

Anecdotally we know this - it's almost impossible to get funding for your own research, and almost all smaller research grants are set in the framework of conferences, events, larger programmes and 'thematic' groups that funders are interested in. I don't fancy my chances of getting anything more speculative and long range funded. Who would I go to? How would I apply in the first place when much of the application process is governed through existing programmes? The day of the departmental budget, there simply to fund staff research is long, long gone, at least in my field. We can't even fund the basic infrastructure of the unit, even at the level of basic admin.

Mrs Hossenfelder, you truly are an inspiration. I admire how you address all these difficult to digest topics on where science is moving. Such as also that video you made about why you left academia. I am currently writing up after 6 heavy years of PhD, and listening to your story and watching your content has been truly uplifting, inspiring and mostly educative. Keep up the great work. I’d love to pivot into a direction similar to yours some day. Although it seems to me like becoming a science communicator is a difficult, almost insurmountable task. Anyway, if you are ever near Basel and want to visit a lab working on quantum computation or have time to chat, feel free to reach out! Best wishes!

thx for your openess and the insights

Wasn't Physics considered settled literately days prior to Einstein's publication of the Special Relativity? It only takes one researcher to define what progress is.

it's the Sophons' fault

Most discoveries are coming from material science which is prone to Trademark imprisonment. However, when those trademarks time out we'll have a flood of advancements beyond profit models.

Thanks for that video

The state of knowledge today is such that serious effort is required to truly innovate, yet few scientists have the luxury to spend significant amounts of time on risky and work intensive ideas: on 3 to 5 year contracts they have to get publishable results, write up papers, present them at conferences, apply for grants with proposals that senior peers in the field find exciting and get ready for another 3 to 5 year PostDoc position. There is no room for a few years lost chasing down an idea that doesn't pan out. In fact, admitting that an idea failed is not incentivized at all: better to stick with it, make it look like it worked out in a fashion and write papers anyway, increasing the overall noise in academic publishing. Few of those who obtain the luxury to take risks and go for the high hanging fruit through a permanent contract actually change their mode of operation.

My take is that science has become a business, complete with counterproductive success metrics. A business guy, Charlie Munger has a helpful quote: Show me the incentives and I'll tell you the outcomes. The field of science has become the servant of business and government and because of that objective truth is much less relevant than support of a narrative.

I can relate. When i was new i took in a lot more information. Now that I'm older I rather refine and connect my findings.

well in Vietnam we got a nickname for a crisis that we had on our own. Its called "instant ramen research effect". It means university students just publish their papers without much care and attentiveness to it or consider its utility in the future. We lack progress because we think publishing our papers is the last thing to do, not going further into it

It isn't the case in biological science the progress in the last 20 years is astounding. In 2004 they published the human genome after years of work and billions of dollars. Now you can do it in an afternoon for a few thousand.

And people criticize Stephen Wolfram for not engaging in the increasingly useless scientific paper publishing system, meanwhile he and his team (especially Jonathan Gorard) are doing ground-breaking research on computational models of reality, and it gets largely ignored.

No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o! Sabine, please do something about this! My team and I write sci0fi stories, but we want to see the ideas becoming a reality! Bitte, bitte, bitte, Sabine, machen Sie etwas dagegen! Wir möchten wirklich die Zukunft sehen! Ich gehe jetzt weinen.

The fundamental issue is that new entrants have a lot more to study than “prescribed” just like antibiotic resistance, this lesser percentage feel the same strong drive cumulatively resulting into more “work-life balance” style choices by the vast exposed (currant) majority.

My hypothesis is that being creative and innovative paid off well in the past, now scientific world is highly standardized, centralized and competitive. Great minds need more funding programs, less politics and less restrictions.

The following innovators lacked formal education in science, physics, math, or engineering: Edison, Tesla, Faraday, Da Vinci, Darwin, Newton, the Wright Brothers, and Henry Ford. Significant advancements have been made both through formal education and by those outside traditional academic pathways. By embracing diverse perspectives and adhering to first principles, we can enhance our collective potential. In recent decades, while there has been a decline in patent filings, there has been a rise in open-source technology. This shift suggests a growing recognition that progress is not solely driven by profit. Collaborative efforts in design and innovation often yield far greater results than when individuals seek exclusive financial gain and recognition for foundational ideas.

Why would these three be the only choices? How about the fact that what we are currently studying require more and more expensive tools because they get further from our everyday scale? Or not having armies actively funding new ways to kill each other thereby having less actual money for research relative to our needs? Why raise two obviously false answers to one possible one but leave other plausible answers unexplored?

I’ve noticed this. A lot of science news channels on KZfaq seem to cover research that doesn’t really go anywhere. A lot of “discoveries” that end up being bad data or require a very long time to commercialize

Too many scientists under pressure to publish papers finding something to publish a paper about, as opposed to only publishing a paper when they actually find something worth publishing. I think the internet has a part to play in this too, compared to when it was all on physical paper, kind of like how photographs had more value before digital cameras.

I always felt that way that nothing exciting happened after smartphone in consumer market it's just mix of touch screen in random appliances

As far as I understood the metrics introduced in the studies mentioned in the video (I may have gotten wrong the second one about the disruptiveness of papers and patents), it seems that their conclusion is that the ratio of novel research and top scientists to 'mediocre' research and scientists is declining. Though it does not follow that the 'absolute ammount of good science' is decreasing. Rather it says that now we allow people to pursue an academic career even if their work is not that innovative, and it does not imply that we actually produce less breakthroughs as what matters is not 'most scientists make a breakthrough' but 'a lot of scientists make a breakthrough'.

To have a successful career in science it is more important that you are good in networking, grand application, gaming performance metrics, and so on rather than being good at research.

That graph correlates surprisingly well with economic mobility and the middle class. I wonder how many scientists would challenge the established system but are too financially unstable to risk it.

Yo! John Carmack worked on VR!! If you dont know who John Carmack is he is the original creator of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom from ID software. Now he is working in META, probably on their META headset or something

All-in-all, scientific research itself is getting harder while the amount of administration and networking required to perform it is also growing. As our understanding advances it becomes more and more expensive (in terms of time and/or materiel) to perform even basic research, meaning that any form of truly comprehensive work will take longer and be more expensive. At the same time, increased competition at most academic institutions and in most fields means that you need to chase publications and citations to stay relevant and stand out amongst your peers. To top it off, every project that seeks to meaningfully pose and answer a serious question runs several risks: 1. The question may have been asked and answered before without your knowledge, thus rendering your research less noteworthy. 2. The question you pose may be poorly defined, or you methods may turn out to be unsuitable, thus weakening or invalidating your results. 3. You may need to make suppositions about the answers and what they mean for the field or a benefactor in advance to even get any funding or access, thus biasing your research. Any one of these points can lead to unfavorable outcomes, there is always a risk of failure. Failure affects your ability to get published, to get seen, to get cited and acclaimed. This isn't new, but it is getting worse as the "game" of science is getting to be better understood. More and more players (publishers, funders, tool providers, etc.) are entering the game, adding more resources but also introducing more hurdles and pitfalls. Everyone has skin in the game, and need to get their piece of the pie somehow. And nobody wants to back a "failure". So it's understandable why "groundbreaking" research papers will be fewer and further between. Any researcher who has spent years studying (and may be in significant debt) and building a name for themselves can be forgiven for not gambling everything on any one big project... You'd need to be insane, independently wealthy or VERY sure about the question(s) you're asking and what answer(s) you're going to find.

It is no surprise that scientific progress is slowing down. The surprise is that people needed a scientific paper to spell it out. To get breakthroughs often requires thinking outside the box, using imagination and being free enough to be willing to take risks. In a world where people are increasingly taught what to think rather than how to think and students are being punished rather than praised when they try something new rather than the tried and tested, it leaves less and less room for the necessary, freedom of imagination, willingness to take risks by thinking outside the box, that is so essential and needed to get scientific breakthroughs.

There is a fundamental shift in scientific inquiry and is becoming very dogmatic. There was a time someone would propose something out of the "norm" and the response was "Well, what kind of experiments could prove or disprove this?" Now, the response is "That's not how it works" and someone's future is ruined. I think this is how science rarely (but sometimes) made huge breakthroughs. It feels like this avenue is no longer available.

(commenting before watching the video) from following various science channels my idea is that we simply need someone to come up with new models for physics (aka the theory of everything) pretty much like many discoveries and inventions we have today couldn't have been made with the "old physicics" before relativity and quantum physics were explored,we are now "stuck" again needing a new more accurate model because we pushed our current one to its limits which makes new progress harder to archieve

Most people over 50 who have worked in the field know this, particularly the last 20 years. From around 1999-2000 onward (the explosion of the internet) the quality has reduced drastically. I look at old papers from the 1930's-1980's and am in awe at their quality. It's almost hilarious now, with the Chinese flooding the system with papers of very dubious quality.

I worked in "pure science" for 18 years, in two University physics labs. It never paid well. I went to applied science, which pays much better. In Pure Science, it has become too political too. If you come out with "unpopular research" you will find your facility defunded, and in some cases closed. After I left one lab, they came out with unpopular research regarding Fracking and Earthquakes. They were defunded and closed within a year of that paper being released. Labs which came out with research debunking some of the global warming hysteria, also experienced "funding issues" as well. Pure research is easier. As long as you apply science to create a profitable product, you will get financially rewarded. You are assured a job as long as you periodically produce another golden egg. I don't blame any scientists for fleeing pure science and going into (commercial) applied science.

being listed as in research and development is not the same as actually doing science. in my company we have thousands listed in R&D but most are in non science fields such project managers , administrative assistants etc.

True innovation requires the risk of total failure, which is not acceptable in the current landscape of science, so most scientists paly it safe going for pretty standard research that of course will give you pretty standard discoveries, nothing groundbreaking. Because who would give funding to someone who either makes a discovery that will reshape science or most likely will go nowhere (hence becoming a waste of money and time), and because you need many failures before getting the golden ticket, it really is not economically viable. That’s ignoring that society now expects everything to have an immediate use, an economic value, when in reality that is not the goal of science, and in fact, maybe the greatest discovery are not useful in that sense; its repercussions may be, but if you don’t even explore the initial idea you’ll never have the time to find out what you can do with it. The thing is that at least the industry side has no time for that, and it’s the industry side that pays for research.

Sabine, scientific progress maybe slowing down in the US , Europe, Africa and other parts of the globe but not in Asia particularly in my home country Singapore. In Singapore, scientific progress is alive and continually generate novel knowledge , inventions and innovations in quantum physics and technology. Singapore is small but big in accomplishments and is leading in many breakthroughs in science and technology.

One hypothesis, progress was never linear, when a new revelatory breakthrough comes along there’s a huge number of “how else can we use this?” moments, and once a lot of them have been discovered progress stalls for awhile. An example (I think) would be something like the car; at first there were a ton of new designs and ideas, but eventually people discovered the ICE, and the progress has been a lot more incremental since then.

Base science at universities (which tends to deliver the disruptive break-throughs) was completely undermined in the mid 2000s, when business schoolers were allowed to inject themselves into the scientific process 1) with the demand that only research that had immediate application (and therefore monetizability) should be funded, 2) tried to introduce "free market" like dynamics by setting up the funding system (rather than steady public funding, no matter immediate applicability) and 3) introduced the metric of "number of citations" as the success criterion for receiving that funding (rather than whether the research was truly revolutionizing, which would require the business schoolers to understand the science). Here's why it didn't and never could've worked: 1) Nobody knows the future, hence, nobody knows what research will deliver the next break-through... hence, "monetizability" leads to researchers just going into greater detail with whatever is already considered "valuable" (more of the same) - 2) the funding system not only leads to constant insecurity for researchers, meaning less willingness to do new research, but the funding application process itself eats up an insane amount of the researchers' time (something like 80-90%)... meaning much less time to do fundamental thinking, therefore (again) favoring much less demanding "more of the same" research - and 3) the citation metric itself is wide open to manipulation (especially to researchers with an average IQ of probably 150+), meaning researchers who are willing to actively bolster their citation numbers to get more funding will win, e.g. by engaging in mutual citation, sticking only to already popular topics and (especially) diluting the amount of actual real innovative research per article in order to get most citations per drop of new science... which in turn means other researchers have to read ever more fluff articles in order to get just a few specks of gold dust. This is what happens when you let average IQ business schoolers set the rules for high IQ natural science. Effing stupid. 😑👈

I think one of the main contributions to lack of scientific progress is the lack of understanding failure. Many students who fail at a science class or on a test or even on an experiment decide that the field isn't for them and abandon the sciences. But science is all about overcoming failure.

Nailed it, It's the increase of Quantitative Research over resourceful/ Qualitative scientific proposals. Institutions have become saturated with peer-reviews most of which are Quantitative research over resourceful/ Qualitative scientific proposals. Institutions have now sadly become saturated with peer reviews that are derivatives of one another LMAO.

That was rather abrupt. Seemed like the setup for a big discussion, and then "see you bye". My brain has been blue-balled.

This was alluded to in the “My dread died, and now I’m here” video. Follow the money: people are rewarded for getting targeted grants and writing papers not for breakthroughs. I’ve also noticed that a number of engineers are called scientists.

I may not articulate it well enough on what I'm going to write now and I might not have still experienced it much but.. One of the main issue is... there is a sense of discouragement in allowing researchers going on their own crazy path, If anything I feel only very crazy people who are away from all the research world and societal norms would do something beautiful... With this Information world and globalization in every aspect ...the no. of instances of different paths has decreased drastically... there's almost a cycle like phenomenon among researchers ... to put it simply the no. of branches in depth first search tree is narrowing into a single long coconut tree Even if I read my own comment ... it might look very vague and naive ... but hope I gave 0.001% gist of it If Brilliant minds are put in isolated rooms and if we have more of those sort of rooms around the world...it is statistically more likely for a broader spectrum of thinking to take place. Chaos is undermined or undervalued. Collabration should be just a one of the tool, not hinder diversity in thought

Development of science and technology are phase shifted. Breakthrough in science gives rise to development of new technologies which enable new measurements methods and lead to dew scientific discoveries. We are in the phase of technology growth. Example: gravitational waves. We don't know what we will discover, using these new methods. It needs time. Besides that, Sabine is definitely right talking about problems in quantitative evaluation of research.

something I learned while working for telstra was that a lot of progress came because a high corporate profit tax meant that profits had to be spent on the company, leading to company expansion and, importantly, company research departments. The increased tax income for government science probably didn't hurt either. bell labs prolific research department was particularly mentioned as a beneficiary of this tax system once the tax incentive for pushing profits back into the company went away, a lot of companies focussed on a narrower set of saleable inventions, rather than broad research that might, or might not become saleable later. I don't know whether or not this factoid will be borne out by research, or if it's a mistaken idea from bell labs and telecom australia laboratory gossip.

“In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes." -Philipp von Jolly, 1878.

Content aside, the presentation in this video was super engaging and I very much enjoyed it. And the content was fascinating as well.

Reductive materialism is a woefully inadequate paradigm for explaining the world. That’s the reason.

I started work in science in the 1970s and retirded a few years ago. I think the 1970s were more productive because they were more laid back and we had more time to think. Endless demands for papers to keep funding or advance career destroys creativity and originality. I also worry about subjectivity creeping in nowadays. I think we need to get back to a strict Popperian standard for science. If it can't be properly tested with the possibility of it being falsified (and things like modelling climate change on a computer fail that test) then it isn't science. Too much modern science seems to have subjectivity creeping in.

The whole process of funding and peer review has become tainted by hubris. Disruptive being the operative opposition. Then there is the problem of profit driven corporations reducing or even eliminating R&D.

I think it's some mixture of 2 and 3. Not only is there less reward, but it may even be harder to find new discoveries due to the breadth of knowledge we already have. For example, in mathematics, the individual researches even in similar fields may have very little clue about what another researcher is discussing. This higher degree of specialization may very well make collaboration more difficult. There is also the idea that the easy stuff has already been found. However, 3 is also an obvious factor.

I would say option 3 combined with growing complexity. Compare the effort & costs to prove relativity theory vs effort and cost to prove existence of f.e. Higgs boson.

Can't speak for physics but in my field, computational mathematics, there are tons of discoveries to make. The problem is more the collapse in scientific process and the drop of quality in the new students. 20 years ago, when I was a postgrad, we found undergrad exam papers from decades earlier and even we struggled with their content. It was clear that standards had dropped. When we discussed it with one of the profs, they confirmed that standards were dropping most of the world. I got a very good postgrad science education. I am horrified when I see some of the papers being published now because the methodology is so bad.

I love your presentations, Sabine, and your wit and humor too. Keep it up! Tell it like it is!

When I was a student intern at my government defense lab in 1981, I asked my mentors there how funding worked. They said, "We think of something interesting to work on, then figure out a good story to convince the Army they should fund it." This needed to be done roughly every 4 years, and took several weeks of their time. My two mentors published a joint paper every year or two, and each attended roughly 3 one-week-long conferences per year, at which they often (but not always) presented a 5-minute talk on their latest results. The PhD researchers had continual coverage of student interns working 6-month shifts, and often had BS-level, MS-level, and technician-level supporting researchers. The lab director was a civilian, who answered to a civilian, who answered to a civilian at the Pentagon, who answered to the Secretary of the Army. The lab's physical plant was run by an Army colonel, on a 3-year detail to be the lab head's deputy. Fast forward to present day, same lab: Top Army brass decide what areas will receive funding, based on what they think the Army will need in 20 years. Managers chosen for those areas parcel out the funding, according to their guesses on what research will keep the brass happy. The re-prioritization of areas and subsequent re-shuffling of funds happens every 1 to 2 years, complete with extensive outside reviews that take everyone an entire month to prepare for. Each researcher MUST publish one first-author paper per year, at a bare minimum. Conference attendance must be approved by a 2-star general, and is contingent on presentation. Even with a presentation, if someone else from the lab could possibly present it, your attendance might not get approved. Nearly all researchers are PhDs; BS, MS, and technician help is a rarity. The lab director now answers directly to a 1-star general. The lab's physical plant is now run by an entirely separate Army agency. Staff support for researchers has largely been off-sited. The remaining support staff is its own organization, answerable to the lab director instead of individual branch chiefs and division chiefs. Is the present-day lab better than it was in 1981? IMO, no. It is incredibly pressurized and stressful. Getting anything fixed or installed takes years, literally. The paperwork might be all electronic now, but it has multiplied. For example, setting up an outside collaboration takes 4-6 months of paperwork instead of a simple phone call or email. PhDs have to do everything themselves, with no helpers. Funding must be requested 3 years in advance, while at the same time priorities shift so often that it is difficult to apply one's research to the Army problem before priorities change again. HOWEVER: We're churning out way more journal publications.

Did you consider Kuhn's point of view on scientific revolutions? It could be just a phase in which we have to dig deeper into current theories in order to slowly discover and highlight their weaknesses, which will propel new breakthrough discoveries. Of course, this is not incompatible with an additional "sociological" element on how research has changed and how basic research is less and less funded, but a possible causal link between the two is not so obvious.

So many possible explanations and dimensions to this problem that it's hard to know which ones are the bigger factors. Fundamental breakthroughs are harder to come by because the underlying science is more mature, universities and Industry reward quantity over over quality, and the really interesting scientific Frontiers exploring the three great nested mysteries (emergence of the universe, within that the emergence of life, and within that the emergence of mind) appear to be stuck. Whether that's stuckness is due to lack of creativity or simply how staggeringly difficult the problems are remains to be seen, but the latter seems like the bigger part of the answer, at least in my humble opinion from years of struggling with the third of those Mysteries. I think a bigger problem frankly is that Science education, present company excepted, strips out curiosity and wonder, turning off young students and what would otherwise be eager young minds from the scientific exploration of nature. That in my book is the bigger tragedy that can only impoverish science and slow real and creative solutions to the remaining huge problems on the table.

We've been modeling scientific progress as SP(x)~=e^x but in the case where Frontinus' Limit is non infinite, it's more accurate to say SP(x)~=L/(1+e^-x). The thing that's new is we've finally reached the point where these two functions are starting to diverge from each other in a meaningful way. "Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments." -- Julius Sextus Frontinus, in a paper dated 10 AD. It's safe to say he drastically underestimated L, but the existence of a limit was his idea.

when you've been conditioned to expect exponential growth, linear growth can appear to be a regression. It may also be fair to view those data as an economist would a market correction. The deeper nature of the physical world as we know it, which was largely uncovered post industrial, electrical, and nuclear revolution, has largely been tackled. Not by coincidence, post WWII era, and during the onset of the Cold War, at a time period when investment in scientific advancement was synonymous with global influence, and at a time when the world became a vastly smaller place in a short period of time.

Sabines yt-Face game in the thumbnails is top notch!

An awesome analysis!! We cannot expect more and more breakthroughs. About Patents, there now are 236 Patents on methods for cutting an egg. ... some did not work

The MBAs running corporate education have managed to monetize our understanding of brilliant thinking and limit the pathways that get truly new approaches to deep scientific issues funded. Stifling ideas that have no short term tech payoff in favor of those have market viability within the space of a decade. The corporatization of higher education and the pressures the financial overlords of finance impose on our most innovative thinkers will be the death of us all ,,, or at least most of us.

I was about to put a really nice and appreciative comment here but then you started talking about Brilliant

The standard model is a box which only allows small changes where the whole system cannot be changed. Decline is normal in such circumstances. Until the whole model can be challenged no significant changes are likely.

There are always spots of human creativity and phases of stagnation in history. What are the causes? I have no clue, but perhaps the starting points are guided by a challenge we have to face and then it becomes a self-starter.

When you limit the freedom of speech, the good ideas cannot make it to the top, and the bad ideas, never make it to the bottom.

I choose 3 then. What do we win if we pick the right one ?

very pleasant to hear and see.

One thing you need to consider is that people patten less things due to a rise in global corporate espionage.

Couple thoughts. Number one - there is disruption in scientific progress because of certain social movements not to be named here. Number two - it strikes me that big part of technologies we have now are just improvements on the technologies that were introduced 100 or more years ago. Are we living in "three body problem" scenario?

4) there is a need for a paradigm shift, like QM or GR. Within the current paradigm everything (or almost everything) has been discovered

0:05 all the things you listed haven't improved significantly in almost 10 years. The exponential growth in computing power we saw in the 90s and early 20s is long gone.

Not only less "discoveries" but usually smaller steps and sometimes "vague"

A few Qs come to mind: Is there a lack of areas of research that are as open as from the 1950s? Is the model of publishing getting in the way of innovative research? These are just for starters. Feel free to throw tomatoes at me and call me naive. :)

This is very helpful, as a person torn on what to study in uni. Economics is starting to sound more relevant, although I'm not sure how much room there is for actual quality assessment there. I do wonder though, has meaningful innovation really gone down, or just moved in behind private company NDAs? That still sucks because it prevents actual collaboration and robs 99% of scientists of knowledge to do really cool stuff with. I wish I could be content with just going to study physics and not worrying about all the social aspects of science today.

The equipment needed to make a breakthrough is beyond the resources of a single university or even a single country. It isn’t a coincidence that the Higgs Boson was discovered at CERN. At the same time industry needs more scientists so university research is primarily to support teaching, training post graduate students and keeping professors up to date.

It has been all downhill since peer review became a thing.