It could also be overcrowded
Science Is Getting Harder
141–150 of 150 posts
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument does not hold any sort of deeper inspection. The greats of quantum mechanics, people like Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger etc. we're all professors, which at the time put you up in the highest ranks of the middle class or the lower upper class + the status of the title it implied in Germany for example. They were amongst the highest paid salaried employees. In comparison now a typical professor salary is l…
Since you specifically mention Germany: professors are incredibly well paid in Germany and also enjoy high social status. Of course, a lot of them don't do any science, they are the CEO equivalent of an institute. Salaries for PhDs and PostDocs are a different story of course. They are alright in theory, but often you can only get a part time job, which in reality means a > full time job with a part time salary.
I was specifically talking about the days of the founders of quantum mechanics or even the times of Teller et al.. Today professors are in fact not that incredibly paid anymore in Germany. Sure they still have reasonably high salaries but compared to junior developers they earn approximately the same. Regarding PhD students yes depending on field, you might get a half position, however I'm not aware that postdocs get low paid positions. Compared to the US differences between professor and PhD salaries are much lower AFAIK.
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Private companies are often quite happy to fund an academic research group for a specific project. They also sometimes use this as a source of pre-vetted, competent future hires for R&D positions. The focus is quite different in private companies and research institutions.
Yes, but why? How can taxpayer-funded research institutions morally justify doing research that doesn’t increase our collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application in the short term?
> How can taxpayer-funded research institutions morally justify doing research that doesn’t increase our collective wealth or at least lead to some useful application in the short term?
It is not obvious that fundamental research does not “increase our collective wealth of lead to some useful application”. Just not in the short term, usually. Despite a lot of economics theories, companies being directed by their self-interest or that of their shareholders does not lead to good outcomes over the long term. Someone needs to do it, who’s not going to be limited by ROI over the next 5 years. In practical terms, this can only be public funding.
Taxpayer-funded institutions justify it by pointing out that if there are short-term applications, companies tend to already do the R&D themselves, therefore public money is not needed to have good outcomes. The alternatives are:
- research in private institutions with public money (the big pharma model), which has obvious ethical issues when said private institutions make billions off of publicly-funded research.
- public institutions funding short-term research through things like patent licensing, which is quite impopular (there is a strong argument that public institutions’ output should be public; governments are not corporations).
- governments not funding research at all, which quickly leads to countries falling hopelessly behind as you cannot count on corporations to give a fuck about public good.
Overall, it seems like a good idea to let everyone do what they do best: corporations focus on bringing stuff to market and applications developments, whilst institutions with a longer outlook focus on things that could be used in applications 20 to 100 years from now.
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The argument does not hold any sort of deeper inspection. The greats of quantum mechanics, people like Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger etc. we're all professors, which at the time put you up in the highest ranks of the middle class or the lower upper class + the status of the title it implied in Germany for example. They were amongst the highest paid salaried employees. In comparison now a typical professor salary is l…
Since you specifically mention Germany: professors are incredibly well paid in Germany and also enjoy high social status. Of course, a lot of them don't do any science, they are the CEO equivalent of an institute. Salaries for PhDs and PostDocs are a different story of course. They are alright in theory, but often you can only get a part time job, which in reality means a > full time job with a part time salary.
>professors are incredibly well paid in Germany and also enjoy high social status.
Around 80k €/year as W2 professor base salary
Post-tax 55k €
Guess that might be considered incredibly well paid in Germany
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Hmm, I don't think that's something we can predict. Someone could have said the same thing before general relativity... in fact, most people did because they thought we were almost done.
I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system.
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, I don't think that's something we can predict. Someone could have said the same thing before general relativity... in fact, most people did because they thought we were almost done.
I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system.
That would be dumb though because it has nothing to do with the original point. Maybe you just feel like arguing.
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system.
That would be dumb though because it has nothing to do with the original point. Maybe you just feel like arguing.
I mean, I would love for you to expand upon how:
>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.
Is unrelated to:
>I would argue that general relativity barely affects humans day to day lives, whereas the nuclear model of the atom completely changed the global political system.
Maybe to help you, I was using General relativity as a time marker (i.e. it was the first sea-change scientific discovery that had limited impact on day-to-day human life)
You then argued that my premise was incorrect, because before general relativity was formalized, people could have believed that all future discoveries were too abstract to affect day-to-day human life.
I then argued that you were correct in that general relativity in fact was too abstract to affect humans' day-to-day life.
Then you made a personal attack against me.
Now we are here.
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#148We are in need for new metrics beyond citation count or quantity of published papers. A century ago, there was more content in each paper than it is today. This is mainly related to the incentives that exist today to publish, e.g. for getting a raise in salary or getting a getting a new academic position. I like to cite older papers because I can reference them multiple times in a single manuscript, reducing the numb…
I have a feeling whatever metric you define will just create different problems. The high emphasis on metrics itself is the problem, because quantifying someone's research quality is not at all trivial. To your other point: I get what you mean, and I don't even disagree, but I could also make the exact opposite point. Papers today often are these big, overly structured manuscripts that actually cointain a multitude o…
Yes, I don't have a solution - I should have made that more clear in my original post.
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#149The methodology seems very weak. The author looks at stats but none of the statistics clearly have anything to do with whether science is hard or not.
The whole piece is, imo, pure speculation masquerading as analysis.
Re: Science Is Getting Harder
#150This 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 m…
In maths, this does seem very dependent on what work your peers and community recognize as progress. Maybe problems that are more and more trivial should be considered acceptable to publish, simply as being a contribution in filling in gaps. Or maybe the works of many more mathematicians should be tied together in larger contributions.
More scientist will mean that overall we have more time to spend in the dusty cobweb filled corners that have yet to be studied in fine detail. And while many of those corners contain nothing interesting. If even one of them contains something truly undiscovered it's worth it right?