Hardly surprising. Besides fraud, in science you're not overturning past experimental data, you are adding to it, forming an ever more complete and accurate vie

Hardly surprising. Besides fraud, in science you're not overturning past experimental data, you are adding to it, forming an ever more complete and accurate view of reality. Disruption really just means stumbling upon something unexpected. Once you know there is something there, it opens up a whole world of new avenues for studying in that space, but it doesn't really make it any easier to find something unexpected again. Consider for example deep sea archaeology. When you find a shipwreck, there's going to be a flurry of activity as people study the shipwreck, and the more they answer the questions they started with, the more new questions they are going to want to ask, so even long after the initial discovery there's going to be a continuous string of studies refining knowledge about that wreck. And this is true of every wreck. But finding one shipwreck doesn't generally make it easier to find the next, assuming the same resources, new wrecks are going to be discovered at a pretty steady rate. So the number of discovered wrecks grows linearly, but with each being revisited regularly, the cumulative amount of research done on all wrecks grows geometrically. Similarly discovering a new chemical opens up many possibilities for studying that chemical, likewise for a new phylum of bacteria, a new type of star, you can only see something for the first time once, but you can take closer looks forever. We should expect the ratio of new things to look like a graph of 1/x. Perhaps it's weird that the absolute number of disruptive papers is holding steady. While there are competing forces at work - on the one hand we have more scientists with better instruments, but on the other hand the low hanging fruit is gone and they must go ever further to find something new - there's no fundamental reason these two forces should perfectly counterbalance. I might posit our society has a certain appetite for discovery and we adjust our allocation of resources to science and innovation to maintain this continuous stream of disruptions, but I at least feel that scientific breakthroughs tend to excite people about science and desire to double down on science, not pull back. Perhaps more realistically we just move the goal posts as to what we consider disruptive such that the top X discoveries of the year are always "groundbreaking." Regardless of the why, this definitely the more interesting part of the story.