Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
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Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#2While there is no doubt that 'CD Index' has been declining over time, it is debatable whether it truly indicates a drop in 'disruption'.
Let's take AI for example. Research papers that were published in 2019-20 have become obsolete within a year or less, and consequently get cited less and less, as more recent and derivative papers introduced better models. Does that make the older papers any less 'disruptive'? No!
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#3The first half of the 20th century had a lot of "low hanging fruit" in physics and chemistry that basically came out of the enlightenment. Things like electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. I wouldn't guess that's always the steady state for research.
The war may have had something to do with it too, I know a lot of advances (like radio / microwave engineering) have roots in the war efforts. But I suspect it's more of just a dry spell because we pushed forward in the 18th-20th century and ran out of ideas
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#4The first half of the 20th century had a lot of "low hanging fruit" in physics and chemistry that basically came out of the enlightenment. Things like electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. I wouldn't guess that's always the steady state for research. The war may have had something to do with it too, I know a lot of advances (like radio / microwave engineering) have roots in the war efforts. But I suspect it's more of…
Wouldn't we be presented with another bout of "low hanging fruits" in the second half of 21st century when tectonic shifts happen in quantum computing, superconductivity, ai, ar/vr/mr etc.?
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#5‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#6Alan Kay wrote an essay on how large scientific breakthroughs where done [1], further discussed in [2]. The funders and the systems of funding of science are to blame for the deciline, for example they won't fund problem finding anymore.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#7I blame the grant funding process. What gets published is what gets funded when written up as a grant proposal. What gets written up as a grant proposal is what is called for by grant funding agencies for their own research initiatives. If you want disruptive science, fund it then. That's all everyone wants to do in science, but the bills need to be payed somehow, so you play the game the funding agencies want you to play.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#8[dead]
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#9If you're really smart, enough to make disruptive scientific discoveries, why bother doing that when you could learn programming and work at a FAANG for $400k, or work in the finance sector and make possibly more? If you stay in science, you'll earn peanuts and not even have any career stability since the academic track is so bad these days.
Re: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
#10From my training as a computer scientist, I am used to the idea that some problems are easy and some are plainly intractable. Perhaps that's also true in science and technology, and we are starting to exhaust all the easy directions.
Still, many less techy problems remain, at least climate change and wealth inequality come to mind. Perhaps we'll see the biggest innovations in solving those in the future.