The future of science

Friedrich Nietzsche

With the loss of the impetus of Christianity, cyclical conceptions of history have resurfaced in the West. Let us see how Nietzsche expresses this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part III, 2.2), at the same time as predicting the replacement of man by the Superman, so he should have been immune to it:

And that spider creeping slowly in the moonlight, and that same moonlight, and you and I, standing before this door chatting about eternal things—must we not all have existed once before? And must we not come again and travel that path that stretches before us, that long and dreadful path? Won't we have to return eternally?

Twentieth-century atheist cosmologists often expressed a preference for a cyclic cosmology, which in their view would make God unnecessary to explain the existence of the universe. Although some of those theories (steady-state cosmology and the alternation of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch) are no longer in vogue, thanks to the data we now have about the origin and future of the universe, new theories continually emerge to replace them.

Are there any signs that modern science is beginning to lose momentum? Let's look at some symptoms:

·         The bureaucratization of research: Although there are now more researchers than ever before, it is increasingly difficult to rate the results of their research. Measures such as the h-index and i10-index have been introduced and are calculated automatically, although it is easy to deceive Google Scholar, which uses them.

·         The relentless drive to publish: Researchers feel pressured to produce as many publications as possible. This often results in research findings not being published together, but rather divided into several articles, which diminishes their quality and hinders their understanding.

·         The shifting of the economic burden: Traditionally, the financial support for publications came from the publishers of scientific journals, who recouped their costs by charging readers. Currently, with the imposition of a culture of everything for free, many journals require authors to pay to publish their articles, leading to the Kafkaesque situation where the very researchers required to publish many articles have to finance them.

·         Constructivism: Radical movements maintain that science is a social construct, determined by the culture in which it arises, and propose that the scientific body of knowledge be destroyed in order to start anew under different assumptions (each movement proposes its own). Some radical environmentalists and animal rights activists go so far as to claim that the disappearance of humankind would be beneficial for our planet. Should we consider them traitors to the human species?

·         Democratic epistemology: The idea that the fundamental principle of democracy (the predominance of the most widespread opinion) should be applied to all branches of human life, including science, can have disastrous consequences for scientific activity. In science, what matters is truth, rather than the number of people who hold a certain opinion.

·         Prevalence of prediction versus experimentation: Many of the advances announced are often conditional and contain terms like could or it is possible that... These are not discoveries; they are predictions of possible findings that could be made in the future. In a previous post, I described 18 news items published by Science News magazine, only three of which reported genuine discoveries. The other 15 were predictions, just two of which were confirmed in the seven years following their announcement, one was discredited, and the remaining 12 remained in the limbo of unconfirmed future predictions.

·         Neglect of basic research: Research with immediate practical applications is given priority, forgetting that basic research makes long-term technological and scientific advances possible. As in politics, there is a tendency to prioritize tactical scientific issues over strategic ones.

The combined efforts of atheistic journalists and politicians are attempting to convince the population that religion is outdated, that God does not exist, and that science will soon lead us to paradise, thanks to the achievement of immortality, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology. We shall see if science manages to achieve these objectives, least of all within the timeframes of just a few decades, or even a few years, currently being announced. Failure to do so will inevitably lead to disillusionment and discontent.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca