Is Science Hitting a Wall?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: John Horgan <jhorgan () stevens edu>
> Date: April 7, 2018 at 5:20:24 PM EDT
> To: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>
> Cc: John Horgan <jhorgan () stevens edu>
> Subject: Is Science Hitting a Wall?
>
> Dave, thought your list might finding this interesting. John
>
> Is Science Hitting a Wall?
>
> Economists show that increased research efforts are yielding decreasing returns.
>
>  
>
> Once again, I’m brooding over science’s limits. I recently posted Q&As with three physicists with strong opinions on 
> the topic--David Deutsch, Marcelo Gleiser and Martin Rees--as well as this column: “Is Science Infinite?” Then in 
> March I attended a two-day brainstorming session--which I’ll call “The Session”--with 20 or so science-y folks over 
> whether science is slowing down and what we can do about it.
>
>  
>
> The Session was inspired in part by research suggesting that scientific progress is stagnating. In “Are Ideas Getting 
> Harder to Find?”, four economists claim that “a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms 
> show[s] that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.” The 
> economists are Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb, all from Stanford, and John Van Reenen of MIT.
>
>  
>
> As an counter-intuitive example, they cite Moore’s Law, noting that the “number of researchers required today to 
> achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the 
> number required in the early 1970s.” The researchers found similar trends in research related to agriculture and 
> medicine. More and more research on cancer and other illnesses has produced fewer and fewer lives saved....
> ​ 
>
> Continue reading at
>
> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-hitting-a-wall/



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