Hall did not notice (deliberately or otherwise) the huge and flourishing field of Black poetry that is now widely recognized. He was pretty siloed. But the point stands: innovation comes often from unexpected (to some, to others expected and long delayed) quarters.
"Surely, the burden of knowledge is more burdensome in science than in writing." Quite the opposite. The burden of Dante, Milton, Shakespeare etc already existing is far more problematic to poets than the existing scientific knowledge. Harold Bloom and The Anxiety of Influence is a good place to start for that.
One very simple explanation for the slowdown of new discoveries is that some fields really do get worked out. For instance, in classical electromagnetism Maxwell's equations seem to be completely successful in explaining all observed phenomena, at least outside of the quantum realm, and so once those were established there wasn't any more work to be done on the fundamental theory of electrodynamics. Of course there were lots of applications, and many difficult problems in terms of how the equations operate in specific concrete situations, but as far as foundational research was concerned the theory was solved. Likewise for biology: by the mid-1960s, all the basic ideas of molecular biology such as the transcription, translation, and expression of genes had been established. Sure, there was a huge amount of work to be done in studying how these concepts operated in particular organisms. But there were no new foundational ideas to be had.
Science is devoted to uncovering the basic laws of nature. If there are a finite number of these basic laws, then it's possible that they all get discovered, and then that's it.
I think that's a reasonable thesis. But one with some assumptions/beliefs baked in. I have different ones. It would be hard to easily run an experiment to test whose are closer — although if some applied metascience experiments pan out it might be easier to tell in ~20 years. But I'll try to list a historical example that I think points out some different beliefs we are bringing to this conversation.
To take your molecular biology example, that was a new branch that did not fall out of the sky, but was willed into existence by one funder's belief and a core group of scientists with vision over 2 decades. I read this FreakTakes piece on how the Rockefeller Foundation helped create the field of molecular biology — https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-report-on-scientific-branch-creation — and believe we could likely will ~5+ branches like that into existence over the course of the next 40 years. with the limitation primarily being funders before ideas. I do believe there's a point at which, if enough funding were reliably committed with a long enough time horizon, the limitation could become ideas/things to be worked out. I just don't think we're there. And I don't think we've given out enough money with the Rockefeller Foundation approach to know how much its effectiveness tapers off as you try it in more and more areas. I believe in it. You might not.
Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki [1809-1849] wrote between 1843/4-1846? a mystical prose poem entitled “Genesis from the Spirit” published in 1871. If we reduce the mystical parts of the poem to a minimum and leave only the purely « objective » parts, we arrive at his poetic description of the “Big Bang” :
“…The Spirit… turned one point… of invisible space into a flash of Magnetic-Attractive Forces. And these turned into electric and lightning bolds – And they warmed up in the Spirit… You, Lord, forced him… to flash with destructive fire… You turned the Spirit… into a ball of fire and hung him on the abysses… And here… a circle spirits… he grabbed one handful of globes and swirled them around like a fiery rainbow… “
This is how poetic intuition could anticipate the scientific discoveries…
Just a fascinating read. Thank you for all of it--I will need to read it again. I do have an example for you about “divorcing” fields--the field of mechanotransduction. Happy to chat offline or here about it!
Working my way back through earlier posts here. The big question this wonderful work brings me to is obvious- why did the systems and incentives change so dramatically in the 1970s? This is also the turning point for job security of the middle classes, plus a whole lot of other social and economic trends that changed direction (usually for the worse). I would hazard a guess that the ultimate cause was the peak in US conventional oil production. If this is the case, then simply instructing people to organise systems the old way and realign incentives may not be enough. I am of the school that sees industrialisation as being a temporary blip in the longer churn of history. The complexity and fragility of industrial-style research science may not be sustainable for that much longer if this is the case. Looking forward to reading more of your back catalogue!
Thanks so much for writing this. The poetry section in particular is an excellent piece of evidence.
Another element you've surely thought about, but for the benefit of the audience: From Robin Hanson I learned how new peer review was, and how Einstein was skeptical of it--that's another part of the institutionalization of science that may end up slowing down science.
Garret, absolutely! I didn't address every human systems change in this piece one-by-one because -- as you're aware -- they're just so correlated and burueacracy often comes bundled in a nice little package. I left certain examples out that I've already addressed other places on the Substack.
It recounts the story of how journals were generally seen as a place to have the debate and not the place for the paper to go once the debate was settled. In that piece, Dirac and Bohr essentially tell Feynman "lol what is this theory?! You don't even understand physics" and Feynman's thoughts went something like "No...these old heads just don't get the theory at all. I'll publish it and we'll let the community decide who is right."
And it was all friendly because nobody's opinion could hold back your ideas from getting published. They just spoke frankly, that's all. It was healthy. Like when you argue with your friends who disagree with you over drinks.
I noticed some overlap here with Adam at Experimental History and his piece about peer review. When the older, established professors begin acting as gatekeepers to grant funding and publications you get more citations of older work and more incremental improvement type work.
There is also the explosion in number of researchers during this time. This raises the expectations of number of publications to get noticed for the next role. This leads to more ‘minimum publishable unit” papers and fewer big jumps. It’s tough to spend three years on a postdoctoral project that might not work at all.
I’ll need to read your post a second time to understand it better. But I have a tangential question about this quote from Freeman Dyson: “and it was made clear that they didn’t want me at their meetings. So, they regarded me, at first, as being on their side, but then afterwards they found I wasn’t.” This is very strange to me because we’re talking about mathematics, not something more “political.” What does “their side” represent?
I mean...a lot of internal scientific spats have certain flavors of taking sides that can be slightly political. I've heard people strongly identify as "bayesians" or "frequentists" for example.
Sometimes it can be hating that the other side's work even exists when things are really petty. But others it can take on more of a "they can't do anything for me/that interests me, yet they steal limited resources/positions that can be going to my side" sort of attitude.
You get the idea, I'm sure. Political in the sense of office politics.
There are fads and fashions in mathematics, just like in any human endeavor. In the 1960s, there was a strong push in the mathematics community for very high levels of abstraction, and if you had to embrace that in order to be accepted. Later, the pendulum swung the other way, and being too abstract became a liability. It's not really about "politics" in the conventional sense, but rather what's "hot". In Dyson's case, there was a shift away from physics, so any mathematician associated with physics was tainted.
Hall did not notice (deliberately or otherwise) the huge and flourishing field of Black poetry that is now widely recognized. He was pretty siloed. But the point stands: innovation comes often from unexpected (to some, to others expected and long delayed) quarters.
"Surely, the burden of knowledge is more burdensome in science than in writing." Quite the opposite. The burden of Dante, Milton, Shakespeare etc already existing is far more problematic to poets than the existing scientific knowledge. Harold Bloom and The Anxiety of Influence is a good place to start for that.
+1 on the reference to Bloom and Anxiety of Influence--- I agree with starting there.
One very simple explanation for the slowdown of new discoveries is that some fields really do get worked out. For instance, in classical electromagnetism Maxwell's equations seem to be completely successful in explaining all observed phenomena, at least outside of the quantum realm, and so once those were established there wasn't any more work to be done on the fundamental theory of electrodynamics. Of course there were lots of applications, and many difficult problems in terms of how the equations operate in specific concrete situations, but as far as foundational research was concerned the theory was solved. Likewise for biology: by the mid-1960s, all the basic ideas of molecular biology such as the transcription, translation, and expression of genes had been established. Sure, there was a huge amount of work to be done in studying how these concepts operated in particular organisms. But there were no new foundational ideas to be had.
Science is devoted to uncovering the basic laws of nature. If there are a finite number of these basic laws, then it's possible that they all get discovered, and then that's it.
I think that's a reasonable thesis. But one with some assumptions/beliefs baked in. I have different ones. It would be hard to easily run an experiment to test whose are closer — although if some applied metascience experiments pan out it might be easier to tell in ~20 years. But I'll try to list a historical example that I think points out some different beliefs we are bringing to this conversation.
To take your molecular biology example, that was a new branch that did not fall out of the sky, but was willed into existence by one funder's belief and a core group of scientists with vision over 2 decades. I read this FreakTakes piece on how the Rockefeller Foundation helped create the field of molecular biology — https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-report-on-scientific-branch-creation — and believe we could likely will ~5+ branches like that into existence over the course of the next 40 years. with the limitation primarily being funders before ideas. I do believe there's a point at which, if enough funding were reliably committed with a long enough time horizon, the limitation could become ideas/things to be worked out. I just don't think we're there. And I don't think we've given out enough money with the Rockefeller Foundation approach to know how much its effectiveness tapers off as you try it in more and more areas. I believe in it. You might not.
Physics has far too much “bishops” that claim “papacy” without sufficient evidence.
Science vs Poetry :
Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki [1809-1849] wrote between 1843/4-1846? a mystical prose poem entitled “Genesis from the Spirit” published in 1871. If we reduce the mystical parts of the poem to a minimum and leave only the purely « objective » parts, we arrive at his poetic description of the “Big Bang” :
“…The Spirit… turned one point… of invisible space into a flash of Magnetic-Attractive Forces. And these turned into electric and lightning bolds – And they warmed up in the Spirit… You, Lord, forced him… to flash with destructive fire… You turned the Spirit… into a ball of fire and hung him on the abysses… And here… a circle spirits… he grabbed one handful of globes and swirled them around like a fiery rainbow… “
This is how poetic intuition could anticipate the scientific discoveries…
(see :
https://www.salon24.pl/u/edalward/1334289,big-bang-according-to-the-19th-century-polish-poet-j-slowacki )
Edward
Just a fascinating read. Thank you for all of it--I will need to read it again. I do have an example for you about “divorcing” fields--the field of mechanotransduction. Happy to chat offline or here about it!
Working my way back through earlier posts here. The big question this wonderful work brings me to is obvious- why did the systems and incentives change so dramatically in the 1970s? This is also the turning point for job security of the middle classes, plus a whole lot of other social and economic trends that changed direction (usually for the worse). I would hazard a guess that the ultimate cause was the peak in US conventional oil production. If this is the case, then simply instructing people to organise systems the old way and realign incentives may not be enough. I am of the school that sees industrialisation as being a temporary blip in the longer churn of history. The complexity and fragility of industrial-style research science may not be sustainable for that much longer if this is the case. Looking forward to reading more of your back catalogue!
Thanks so much for writing this. The poetry section in particular is an excellent piece of evidence.
Another element you've surely thought about, but for the benefit of the audience: From Robin Hanson I learned how new peer review was, and how Einstein was skeptical of it--that's another part of the institutionalization of science that may end up slowing down science.
Garret, absolutely! I didn't address every human systems change in this piece one-by-one because -- as you're aware -- they're just so correlated and burueacracy often comes bundled in a nice little package. I left certain examples out that I've already addressed other places on the Substack.
But I get into the way peer review used to be much more in-depth in this post: https://freaktakes.substack.com/p/feynman-on-journal-reviews-conferences
It recounts the story of how journals were generally seen as a place to have the debate and not the place for the paper to go once the debate was settled. In that piece, Dirac and Bohr essentially tell Feynman "lol what is this theory?! You don't even understand physics" and Feynman's thoughts went something like "No...these old heads just don't get the theory at all. I'll publish it and we'll let the community decide who is right."
And it was all friendly because nobody's opinion could hold back your ideas from getting published. They just spoke frankly, that's all. It was healthy. Like when you argue with your friends who disagree with you over drinks.
I noticed some overlap here with Adam at Experimental History and his piece about peer review. When the older, established professors begin acting as gatekeepers to grant funding and publications you get more citations of older work and more incremental improvement type work.
There is also the explosion in number of researchers during this time. This raises the expectations of number of publications to get noticed for the next role. This leads to more ‘minimum publishable unit” papers and fewer big jumps. It’s tough to spend three years on a postdoctoral project that might not work at all.
I’ll need to read your post a second time to understand it better. But I have a tangential question about this quote from Freeman Dyson: “and it was made clear that they didn’t want me at their meetings. So, they regarded me, at first, as being on their side, but then afterwards they found I wasn’t.” This is very strange to me because we’re talking about mathematics, not something more “political.” What does “their side” represent?
I mean...a lot of internal scientific spats have certain flavors of taking sides that can be slightly political. I've heard people strongly identify as "bayesians" or "frequentists" for example.
Sometimes it can be hating that the other side's work even exists when things are really petty. But others it can take on more of a "they can't do anything for me/that interests me, yet they steal limited resources/positions that can be going to my side" sort of attitude.
You get the idea, I'm sure. Political in the sense of office politics.
There are fads and fashions in mathematics, just like in any human endeavor. In the 1960s, there was a strong push in the mathematics community for very high levels of abstraction, and if you had to embrace that in order to be accepted. Later, the pendulum swung the other way, and being too abstract became a liability. It's not really about "politics" in the conventional sense, but rather what's "hot". In Dyson's case, there was a shift away from physics, so any mathematician associated with physics was tainted.