Scientific productivity is declining

String Theory

A team of Chinese and American researchers published on arXiv an article in September 2024 summarizing their study of the development of science and technology over more than two centuries. The study analyzes 213 million scientific articles published between 1800 and 2020, along with 7.6 million patents granted between 1976 and 2020.

The result of this study is the following: while the number of scientific publications has grown exponentially, the knowledge obtained by humanity grows linearly; in other words, the speed of knowledge acquisition is constant and does not grow in the same proportion as the number of publications.

The end of science?

The magazine Science News has just turned 100 years old. It began with the year 1922. From the beginning, it has numbered its magazines by semesters, rather than years, so the issues of the second half of 2021 bear the number 200. It is one of the longest-lived magazines of scientific information in existence. But its evolution in recent decades is worrying, and does not bring us to be optimistic about the current state of world science.

Technology with a human face

Ernest Schumacher

In his famous 1973 book Small is Beautiful, Ernest Schumacher advocates a technology with a human face, because (according to him) the way modern technology has been developed dehumanizes us. Let's look at a few quotes from the chapter in his book with the same title as this post:

...the modern world has been shaped by technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and, indeed, visible signs of breakdown.

...technology, although the product of man, tends to develop by its own laws and principles, and these are very different from those of human nature or of living nature in general. Nature always, so to speak, knows where and when to stop... Technology recognises no self-limiting principle... [T]he super-technology of the modern world, acts like a foreign body, and there are now numerous signs of rejection.

The unreasonable effectiveness of science

Paul Davies

Paul Davies is an British physicist, expert in cosmology and quantum mechanics, well known for his activity in scientific popularization. In one of his articles [1], with the same title as this post, he wrote the following:

The fact that this rich and complex variety emerges from the featureless inferno of the Big Bang… as a consequence of laws of stunning simplicity and generality… has a distinct teleological flavor.

And in his most famous book, The Mind of God (1992), written in response to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, Davies wrote the following words:

The success of the scientific method at unlocking the secrets of nature is so dazzling it can blind us to the greatest scientific miracle of all: science works.

What Davies poses here has much to do with one of the most pressing problems of our time, the debate between realism and anti-realism, if we use the terms of analytical philosophy. This debate can be summarized in the following words: