Science

Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down.

-- Adam Savage, second host of the TV programme "Mythbusters"

Upcoming conferences at CERN: https://indico.cern.ch/

Dr. Julian Bayliss used Google Earth to explore high-altitude rainforests in Africa. For almost as long as Google Earth has existed, Dr. Bayliss has been systematically flying over northern Mozambique in Google Earth and scanning the satellite imagery. One day he came across what appeared to be a mountaintop rainforest. His virtual discovery set off a chain of events that led to the discovery of an untouched rainforest ecosystem atop Mount Lico in 2018.

– https://blog.google/products/earth/special-stories-from-15-years-of-google-earth/

One of the most famous recent papers in the economics of innovation is “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” by Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, and Webb. It showed that more and more R&D effort is necessary to sustain the present rates of technological progress, whether we are talking about Moore’s law, agricultural crop yields, healthcare, or other proxies for progress. Other papers that look into this issue have found similar results. While it is ambiguous whether the rate of technological progress is actually slowing down, it certainly seems to be getting harder and harder to keep up the pace.

What about in science?

A basket of indicators all seem to document a trend similar to what we see with technology. Even as the number of scientists and publications rises substantially, we do not appear to be seeing a concomitant rise in new discoveries that supplant older ones. Science is getting harder.

– https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/science-is-getting-harder?s=r