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

Servers at LAAS
by Guillaume Paumier
Licensed under CC BY 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

In my previous article I wrote this: perhaps our scientific civilization won’t endure beyond this century. This is what I mean by the title of this article (the end of science), rather than the possibility that science is over because it has already discovered everything that can be discovered, which is very unlikely, as I pointed out in another post.

Science has been an integral part of our civilization for centuries, more than is usually believed, for scientific activity was already palpable during the Middle Ages. Isn’t it absurd to predict that such activity can be ended? How might this happen? Here I propose a few, far from exhaustive considerations: