The Death of Science?

Is science a waste of time, resources and money? This is the current question of many scientific writers and people looking towards the science field for revolutionary discoveries. Articles like Science is Getting Less Bang for its Buck by Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen describe that modern science could be seen as less efficient than in the 1910’s to 1930’s purely based on the magnitude of discoveries. Collison and Nielsen argue that modern science has produced less revolutionary discoveries in physics based on the number of Nobel Peace prizes that have been awarded on modern discoveries when compared to the 1910’s to 1930’s. It was even said that some of the modern discoveries in physics like the discovery of gravitational waves are miniscule to the discoveries of the past like Einstein’s 1915 discovery of his general theory of relativity. They continue by stating that “Not only did general relativity predict gravitational waves, it also radically changed our understanding of space, time, mass, energy, and gravity. The discovery of gravitational waves, while enormously technically impressive, did much less to change our understanding of the universe” (Collison and Nielsen). Collison and Nielsen also compare the amount of people, funding, and publications and show that we are currently at an all time high in each category in the field of science and research which they use to further their point that science is getting less “bang” for its buck since the importance of discoveries is trending downwards despite having more attention being poured into it.  

However, articles like Science Isn’t Broken by Christie Ashwanden hints that science is not broken or at a standstill and attempts to show it is really difficult to create a “rigorous result”. Ashwanden proves the difficulty of creating a scientific discovery by looking at data from U.S. politics and gives the reader the choice of what terms they would like to include along with what factors they would want to use in order to find a result that has a p-value of less than 0.05. With a p-value of less than 0.05, scientists agree that the relationship would then be publishable. The point of this exercise that Ashwanden gives the reader is to show that you could come up with contrary results using similar data. Ashwanden claims that a p-value below the 0.05 threshold does “Not reveal the strength of the evidence, yet … has become the ticket to get into many journals”. Ashwanden claims that using p-values as the acceptable limit for publishable research allows biases to occur in how an experiment is conducted so that the results of the study support the hypothesis. The author claims that this bias can be done easily and can be done subconsciously since there is “No obviously correct way to proceed, which makes it tempting to try different things until you get the result you’re looking for”. 

I believe that science is not a dying field. I agree that science is at one of its all time peaks since there is reaserch being done in nearly every direction of science. I think that the decline of “major“ revolutionary scientific discoveries has slowed down since we the discoveries of the 1910’s to 1930’s were mainly fundamentals in their field. I do not believe that the scientific discoveries of this time period can be fairly compared to the ones a century before it like Collison and Nielsen do since there is less direction for scientists to follow and must continue to delve into deeper topics and learn more information in order to create new theories for testing. Lastly, I think that scientists have a natural bias to shape their research in order to prove their hypothesis as Ashwanden claims and I think this shows that time is being wasted on results that do not have strong supporting evidence along with the fact that research teams are growing in size. As the size of research teams increase, I think that it is hard for scientists to grasp the total image of their research if they are only contributing to a specific part of the research and could therefore miss discoveries or more likely be apart of a less productive study. Despite the field of physics slowing down, I believe that the field of medicine and healthcare is in a golden generation since there is a surge of researchers, funding, and engineers in this field that will help lead to the discoveries of further revolutionary products in the industry.

-Dylan Maund

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