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The pace of scientific "leaps" would be very hard to quantify, and it's certainly not my impression that it's "speeding up". Rather, it's my impression that th
by rubidium 11y ago
The pace of scientific "leaps" would be very hard to quantify, and it's certainly not my impression that it's "speeding up".
Rather, it's my impression that there's been a pretty consistent pace of scientific discoveries for the past 80 years. Advancing technology certainly helps, but technology has been advancing rapidly for quite some time.
The last 20 years hasn't been a big difference from the 20 before it on the hardware end of things.
Recent science has seen an increase in discoveries added by "big data" science (CERN, astronomy) but that's just one more tool in the researchers toolbelt.
- hga 11y agoI perhaps quibble with the dates, but I think it's hard to underestimate how revolutionary and groundbreaking the preceding "30 Years That Shook Physics" were (http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/048624895X http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Years-that-Shook-Physics/dp/048...). Perhaps 35, from Plank's late 1900 "there's quanta out there" to Yukawa's 1935 explication of the strong nuclear force, and don't forget Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in-between, it's still the best we have for gravity. Since then, even with earth shattering developments like the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and what followed from that, things have been quite a bit slower in physics. Biology, though, certainly took up a lot of slack, we only really started getting a handle on its foundations in my lifetime.