Science Is Getting Harder

> I think what you said only applies in iterations of revolutions

I think a major problem is ever since general relativity, all of our (existing and potential) new revolutions are very abstract and hard to relate back to human perception.

Take dark matter/energy for example - if we get a better model to understand that, it will revolutionize how we think about the universe, but it will (hopefully) have less impact on day-to-day society than the nuclear model of atoms did.

Imagine we somehow were able to purge all political and media influence, past and present, from the minds of each person today. And then had them rank the issues they find most relevant in the world. Where do you think the things people today spend all their time politicking on would rank? Similarly imagine they wrote out their 'oughts' of what the world ought look like in their eyes. How much overlap do you think there would be with the political platforms of today?

Of course we can only speculate, but to me it seems self evident that there would be effectively 0 overlap. The issue is that politics invariably turns into a viral team sport where people pick some side, adopt that side's views wholesale, convince themselves they're the most important thing ever, and then set out to convert everybody else to their team, beat the other teams in any way possible, and of course always fanatically cheer on their own team regardless of whether or not its deserved.

And then when things get hot enough, you get violence. Politics is precisely what started WW1. An otherwise irrelevant Archduke was assassinated and then that politically snowballed into everybody killing everybody everywhere, because politics. Then we chose to engage in extreme political myopia imposing absolutely harsh punishments on the losers of the war which, shockingly enough, didn't really lead to them rejoining the "world order" but instead declaring war on it again, and nearly winning.

And the only reason we haven't yet had WW3 is nuclear weapons. War doesn't really work when you can guarantee that your country (and you, for that matter) will most likely not exist at the end, "win" or lose. But now political frenzies are overriding even that most basic aspect of self preservation and inching us closer to WW3 than we've ever been. So no, I do not think he was being tongue in cheek.

This is especially true in math and physics. You will find that no matter what problem you can think of, either it has already been solved to the highest level of abstraction, or it's an unsolved and famous problem, or not worthwhile/trivial. Like, what about analogous of elliptic functions for non-elliptic integrals? already been done. The past century has seen a huge explosion of research into STEM subjects, from math, to physics, to biology, to computer science, etc.. Tens of billions of people people ever lived since the 1800s, and even just a tiny, tiny fraction of them are doing research, is still a huge amount of output. There just isn't much new ground to break, so this means discoveries will either be much more incremental or require considerably more mental horsepower.

Psychology is sorta the opposite: there is no limit to the number of experiments you can run on people or possible associations between causes and effects. It's not like psychology , literature, philosophy, or history has gotten harder over the past century, unlike math, physics, or economics. Sure, there are more advanced statistical methods, but running experiments hasn't gotten harder. This is also why the vast majority of physicists and mathematicians are teachers rather than researchers, and why econ papers have gotten much longer and are full of dense stats methods. There are always going to be new discoveries in biology and medicine, and same for applied math and applied physics, such as engineering or astronomy, but theoretical math and probably also theoretical physics are as saturated as can be.

Having been long in academia, what has increased is commercialization of all kinds of science, number of science managers (like modern day billionaires, taking credit for the work actually done by the graduate students and postdocs, growing to be huge), number of politicians putting their names in various papers (I see managers co-authoring on average a paper per week), brutal competition for status and citations, excellent writing and formalism with little or no substance, rise of administrators with large incomes, gangs and tribes accepting each other grants and papers, intensified politics on awards/recognitions/invited talks and control of main publications, people constantly chasing the same topical subjects for grants and industry relevance, and similar activities. The science component has actually decreased in my view. The system and practices sometimes remind me of the Wall Street, with the currency being fame.

I don’t think this system will last for too long. The environment is increasingly filled with status hungry people. Balaji has a good prediction on that.

> 1911 Solvay Conference on Physics

The Solvay conference was invite only, but I think your point still stands.