Perhaps Science Isn't the problem

 Perhaps Science isn’t the problem

Science is not broken, and the reason that scientific discoveries have stalled in recent years is not due to science itself. Although it's true more funding has gone into research and development with little pay-off this is because there is a lack of new ideas/phenomena. One field that is advancing the most in the present day would be AI or machine learning. However, personally I do not think of AI to be a new idea or breakthrough, rather I find it to be an enhancement of already existing discoveries made earlier in our scientific timeline. If we think about AI it can be summed up to the combination of machinery and computational power, which aren’t new concepts to us. We have been using machinery and computers for almost half a century. Our research into AI is just an improvement and or fusion of older ideas and discoveries we have made prior. The problem does not lie with research and science itself, no the problem is that we are struggling to find new phenomena that have not  already been explained or discovered. 

The article, “Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck” by The Atlantic highlights that scientific work isn’t as meaningful or groundbreaking as it once was in the 20th century, “These are important results, and we’re optimistic that work in AI will have a huge impact in the decades ahead. But it has taken far more time, money, and effort to generate these results, and it’s not clear they’re more significant breakthroughs than the reordering of reality uncovered in the 1920s.” I think the article is looking at science the wrong way, it's comparing our knowledge and understanding in the early 20th century to the modern day which is completely unfair. The discoveries made in the 1920s (such as quantum mechanics) were more impactful but that's because our understanding of physics at that point in time pales in comparison to now. There were so many more phenomena that were unexplained. I think the focus on academia and vast advancement in technology  in the past century has accelerated our knowledge and understanding of the sciences to the point where we now struggle to find new unexplained/undiscovered things in our universe. 

Most of our scientific research, in the present day, focuses on the betterment of things we already know. For example, we know about human genetics due to discoveries in biology made in the 20th century, so now scientists focus on how they can edit human genes to help cure chronic diseases. I think the articles don’t highlight how science now and then is different, they think scientific research and understanding should follow the same process and produce the same results as it once did one hundred years ago. However, we know that is not how science works, and the beauty of science is how it can be used to solve different types of problems or answer different kinds of questions we have at different points in our history. It just so happens that presently most of our scientific research is turned towards improvement of pre-existing findings. Whereas in the early 20th century there was knowledge of physics, biology, and chemistry, but it was much less than it is now.


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