Quantification of science

Chapter 2 of my book, The Quantification of History and the Future of the Western World, is dedicated to quantifying science, something I had done in the introduction to my dictionary, 1.000 grandes científicos (1,000 Great Scientists, Editorial Espasa, 1996), although in this new book I have introduced new tables and figures, and expanded upon the analyses carried out there. Here I will summarize some of the results of this chapter.

The following table shows the list of the 24 greatest scientists in the history of Greco-Roman and Western civilizations. The complete study considers the names of 1,000 scientists, who have been ordered according to the number of lines dedicated to them in the sources and encyclopedias used as the basis for the selection. Personally, I don't agree with all the results, but if I were to give in to the temptation to alter them at any point, that would have been an end to the objectivity I was seeking.

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.

Platitudinous scientific projects

Scientific research has become a race against time. Researchers must publish as much as possible in certain journals because their salary depends on it. They must also propose research projects that would receive official funding, on which will depend their ability to hire scholarship assistants and finance doctoral students, plus the possibility of making trips and paying registration fees for conferences where they will present the status of their research.

However, some researchers lack the imagination to design and propose new research projects. What happens then? They may pose problems whose solution everyone knows and design a research plan to demonstrate it by means of statistics or in some other way that sounds scientific. If the design is astute enough, the official entities that award projects will be convinced to finance the project. On the other hand, by doing this, researchers are playing it safe, because they know the results of their research before doing it.

Science or imagination?

A large part of the "scientific" research currently being developed, rather than being science, is just an exercise of the imagination of "scientists." It seems that we must consider as scientists all those who do mathematical speculations that have little or nothing to do with reality. And naturally, everything a scientist does is “science”. At least, scientific journals and high-profile media consider it as such.

Is there a future for scientific research?

In recent decades, the trend to give preference to applied research over basic research has been clear in the Western countries. Yes, there are special calls for funding basic research projects, but we should clarify what those in charge of allocating research budgets understand by basic research.

This is the Wikipedia definition for basic research: scientific research with the aim of improving scientific theories for better understanding and prediction of natural or other phenomena.

The age of the Nobel Prizes in science

Age of scientific Nobel Prizes, by decades

In my conference closing the 1997-98 term at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, entitled The myth of progress in the evolution of Science, I wrote this:

The Nobel prizes provide an interesting measurement of the evolution of scientific progress during the twentieth century. These prizes award the most important advances in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology and Medicine. Statistics show a few worrying trends, such as the progressively higher age of the scientists who have received the Nobel Prize: the average age has gone up from 47 in the first decade to 60 in the last. The number of Nobel prizes awarded to people below 40 has gone down from nine in the thirties and fifties to zero in the nineties. Not one person born after 1950 has yet received a Nobel prize.

Productivity measures for the increase in life expectancy

In my previous post in this blog I spoke about the article entitled Are ideas getting harder to find? which can be downloaded from the Stanford University website. In this paper, the authors also analyze the increase in life expectancy in the USA and the effort necessary to achieve it, and reach the following results:

What are scientists researching about?

Plant research in space (NASA)

In previous posts I have mentioned some dangers faced by the future of science in the face of the growing obstacles suffered by basic research and the tendency of politicians to prioritize practical applications. The arguments I offered in those posts were qualitative. It is possible, however, to obtain real quantitative data, extracted from the journal Science News, which publishes a fairly complete summary of the results of research in all fields of science and technology. By analyzing 23,946 articles published during 30 years, I have obtained the following table, which shows the number of scientific news related to fourteen of the most researched topics in the fields of biology and medicine during that period of time. (More than half the research results belong to those two fields).

The dominant ideology dares to censor science

In one of the most read and controversial posts in this blog, What science says about human life, which had 92 comments in its Spanish version (so far the blog record), I explained how, for purely ideological reasons, supporters of abortion close the eyes to what science says, which asserts clearly (and has done so for a century and a half) that the life of every human being begins in the fertilization of the ovum by the sperm. Faced with this, abortionists insist on making false statements like these: a fetus is only a part of the mother’s body; a fetus is not a human being; a fetus is nothing but a set of cells (so what are the abortionists?).

A cover of The Lancet

Denouncing one more step towards the ideological control of scientific research, the British journal The Lancet, second in impact factor in the field of Medicine, has published an article accusing certain abortion NGOs and the government of the United Kingdom of interference in scientific research.

The scientists signing the article are part of a team working for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which undertook the evaluation of a project aimed at reducing deaths due to unwanted pregnancies in 14 countries in Africa and Asia (i.e. the number of deaths caused by induced abortions). The project, which was allocated £140 million in funding, was sponsored by the United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) and carried out by two major NGOs working on international reproductive health (an euphemism hiding the word abortion, although those organizations don’t hide it in their websites).

Is scientific research well done?

Tabby Cat
Oliver-Bonjoch, CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes, while reading items published by journals such as Science News, it looks like some research currently being carried out is platitudinous. Either it leads to the discovery of things everyone knows, or time and efforts are spent to investigate in fields that no one cares about. We know that many researchers are anxious to publish, and they must justify somewhat the funds they receive, but up to that point?

Let’s look at a very recent news (April 2019):

Cats recognize their name. A study suggests our feline friends can tell the familiar sound of their name from other words. A paragraph of this news adds: As for whether or not a cat understands what a name is, well, only the cat knows that.

Anyone who has had a cat (I had one half a century ago) knows that cats recognize their name. Was it necessary to do a research about this, probably spending public money, to discover something that everyone knows?

Has research on the human genome stopped?

We all know the Human Genome project, officially launched in 1990, although it had been working partially since 5 years earlier. Its purpose was to identify and decipher all the genes in human DNA in 15 years. The project was completed in 2003, within the foreseen term, although in the year 2000 partial results were published. From the scientific point of view, the project was a success, but perhaps for a part of the public it can look like a failure, as the exaggerated expectations aroused by some media have not been fulfilled.

The media hailed the project as the door to a new medical revolution. Among the revolutionary applications announced were: gene therapy to prevent or correct genetic diseases; premature diagnosis of actual or potential diseases, even from the embryonic stage; or personalized medicine, which would adapt treatments of diseases to the ailing person. Possible dangers were also discussed, such as the manipulation of human embryos to adapt their genes to the wishes of parents or dictatorial governments; or the use of genetic data to select personnel, or to grant or deny insurance and credit...

Happy anniversary

Tomorrow August 12th is the second anniversary of the opening of this blog on popular science. The Spanish version of the blog appeared a little earlier, on January 15th 2014. In these two years I have published over 100 articles, usually one per week, although I have interrupted publication during the summer, and slowed it somewhat in Christmas.

In this anniversary I want to take stock of what has been done so far, and the goals I imposed myself when I started this activity. The decision on whether I have achieved any of these goals is left open to the consideration and critical judgment of the readers.

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:

Scientific fraud, a danger for science

Piltdown man

Fraudulent activity is not exclusive of politicians and the world of finances, though perhaps it is more widespread in those fields. It also affects scientists, who, like every human being, are prone to temptation and sometimes (surprisingly rarely) fall into it. The reasons are the usual: ambition, fame and the unbearable pressure to publish results.

The first thing we must do is find out what is fraud and what it is not. According to the criteria used in the United States, there are just two essentially fraudulent scientific activities: plagiarism and the invention or falsification of experimental results. The following activities are questionable, but not fraud: mistaking speculation with fact; incorrect use of statistical procedures; seeking approval after the fact for ethically controversial experiments. Finally, the following activities must not be considered fraudulent or questionable: judgment errors, differences of opinion in the interpretation of data, or involuntary errors in their analysis.

Science is a tool

Francis Bacon

The utopia The New Atlantis, written by Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Galileo and pioneer of modern philosophy of science, describes a perfect society that would automatically arise from the practice of science, which the inhabitants of the island of Bensalem have made the basis of their society and its government. Like many of his encyclopedic followers, who a century later created the myth of indefinite progress, Bacon believed that science in the future will save man and solve all human problems, opening the way to a paradise on Earth.

This mistake is common. Tools are often confused with their good uses, forgetting that the same tools can also be misused. Let’s look at a few examples, among the thousands that could be cited:

Consequences of scientific fraud, a lesson for politicians

Scientific fraud is an important issue that can give rise to complex ethical problems. The mystery novel Gaudy night (1936), by Dorothy L. Sayers, offers a concrete example. When he is about to defend his doctoral thesis, a scientist discovers a little-known document that demolishes his work. Temptation is too strong, he steals the document and proceeds with his thesis. Unfortunately (for him) one of the university committee was aware of the existence of the document, tries to look it up and discovers that it is missing, and who was the last person who consulted it. The fraud is thus discovered, the thesis is rejected, the case is made public and the researcher is dismissed with unfavorable comments that put an end to his scientific career. As he must support a family, he has to accept a job below his level and finally commits suicide.

The characters in the novel formulate the following ethical problem: Must a person give up his vocation because of having yielded just once to a temptation of fraud? What comes first, the integrity of science or the fate and perhaps even the life of an individual human being? In the words of one of the characters: [That old piece of paper] made no difference to anybody. It wouldn’t have helped a single man or woman or child in the world - it wouldn’t have kept a cat alive; but you killed him for it.

What's the use of a child?

The importance of basic research

The secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences stood up and said:

“Mr. Faraday has the floor.”

“In today’s lecture, rather than speaking about a scientific subject, I’ll perform an experiment before your eyes. But first, allow me a short historical introduction. As you know, Oersted, Ampère and Arago proved that an electric current can give rise to magnetic phenomena. If you set a magnetic needle near an inactive copper wire, the needle points North. If a current passes through the wire, the needle deflects. If the wire is coiled and a current goes through it, the coil behaves as a magnet with two poles, North and South, the same as a typical ordinary magnet.