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Is Science Hitting a Wall?

Military spending drives very little research these days. Star Trek class laser weapons and Terminator AI are about the only examples I can think of. The latter is a really bad idea.
Self driving cars is pushing some interesting research in object detection
 
Chris,

I’m sure this is a one-off but I agree with everything you wrote. I even liked it.

Joe
 
I think that measures such as "The number of drugs approved by the FDA per billion dollars spent on research" misses the point rather. I can't work out what the index in the first article represents, but I suspect it is flawed.

Certainly I think that the total number of patents and/or papers per scientist per year has not declined. Science will only hit a brick wall when people are no longer curious.
 
In many ways, America has given up on "big science" blue sky research. Maybe all the affordable stuff has been done, and now the only way to enable it's continuation is by international cooperation, something the yanks have always been slightly suspicious of.

So, for instance, when the powers that be realised that there was never likely to be much of a commercial payback from the Superconducting Supercollider project, they pulled the plug. An appalling decision which totally goes against the thing which differentiates us from the rest of creation: the desire to KNOW. This was beautifully summarised by Hilbert, the great German mathematician: "We must know, we will know".

There are notable exceptions, such as the International Space Station, but this is more an engineering project than anything else.

Chris
 
Although it is probably apocryphal, Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899 who famously claimed that "everything that can be invented has been invented." I guess after the zip and the vertical filing cabinet it was hard to imagine what else people could possibly invent.
 
Perhaps pure research science is slowing in pace - perhaps because we've picked the low hanging fruit. However I think it would be difficult to suggest that my field (electronics and software) is slowing in pace when in the space of 20 years we've gone from analog phones and the first browsers to phones that can provide more or less instant access to most of the information / knowledge in the world and translate it into any language at the same time.

In fact much of the underlying science for modern communications was done 100 years ago, and we're currently in a period where implementation is catching up.
 
I do not believe that Science is hitting a brick wall. It may be that the Engineering is taking longer to make use of new science. Engineering being the practical application of science is where the general public get to see results. It is still case that there is more science than ever taking place. Statistics like 'more science published in the 5 years than in all of human history up until' (Do not take this literally, I paraphrase - you get the idea)

As an example I have been reading about the potential for Carbon nano technology as tubes and Graphene for years. Applications are slowly coming through.
Continued work in areas like Quantum mechanics is coming to computing, slowly, right now.
I recently read a book (ruddy hard work it was too) on Quantum Biology - the root where Biology gets driven by quantum processes. Fascinating - and interestingly still does not get much of a steer on 'life' and even less on 'intelligent' life.
 
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1981.

For those interested, here's a comment from the person who made the above happen.

Stephen
 
Programming has ended. Nowadays a bunk of young punks just cobble something together from a library of subroutines in a matter if minutes, not caring that a solution could be carefully carved out of the digital by a master craftsman, perfect for that task and no other, beautiful in the minimisation of cycles to execute and rendered directly in the lowest level of language. Tish. Kids today, eh?
 
Swampy,

I see you spotted the sexy entangled quantum thingy that's been in the news.

Joe
 
I do not believe that Science is hitting a brick wall. It may be that the Engineering is taking longer to make use of new science. Engineering being the practical application of science is where the general public get to see results. It is still case that there is more science than ever taking place. Statistics like 'more science published in the 5 years than in all of human history up until' (Do not take this literally, I paraphrase - you get the idea)

As an example I have been reading about the potential for Carbon nano technology as tubes and Graphene for years. Applications are slowly coming through.
Continued work in areas like Quantum mechanics is coming to computing, slowly, right now.
I recently read a book (ruddy hard work it was too) on Quantum Biology - the root where Biology gets driven by quantum processes. Fascinating - and interestingly still does not get much of a steer on 'life' and even less on 'intelligent' life.
Several biological phenomena are now thought to use quantum mechanics, photosynthesis being the main one. It needs quantum tunneling to work.
 
Even smelling stuff — I hope not the farts emanating from Uranus — is a quantum phenomenon.


Joe
 


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