Shadows of the Past: The Scientific Paradox

 Aidan Munoz 

Professor Horgan 

HST 401-A – Seminar in Science Writing 

24 Jan 2024 

Shadows of the Past: The Scientific Paradox

As with every movie and video game series, hardly any sequel can top the caliber of the original. And yet, they continue to gain praise, recognition, and acclaim, maybe even more notable than their predecessors. This is the problem the scientific community is beginning to face. What happens when the overbearing shadows of past discoveries make modern breakthroughs seem minute? What happens to our world when those creative juices that crafted our story come to an end and we deem the secrets of the world “all figured out”? I find that this becomes a prominent point of discussion when, according to a journal from Nature, “disruptive scientific findings” have been on an extremely noticeable decline since 1945. As to be expected, scientists took this finding to be a slight blow to their hard work and careers, as a claim that your life’s work is obsolete may leave you a bit unnerved as well. 

Here lies my claim about the scientific paradox. How can it be deemed that “real breakthroughs” are being produced at a much slower rate relative to the past when every year over a million published papers are shared with the world, changing the way we live our everyday lives? Perhaps it is the origin of the papers and what information they grab from that makes their intrinsic nature of originality less profound. Once again, movie sequels often copy and paste the award-winning formulas of the original to find their stride once more, exploring a new, but not completely foreign, territory. I find this sentiment to be the same in the world of science. Now, we may not be seeing such a drastic change with each passing day, but the “scientific revolution” wasn’t exactly a revolution that people woke up to one day. It was a gradual change that happened over a 200-year window between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, with countless great minds chipping away at the secrets of our world, combining the findings of reliable thought. 

Now ask yourself: How much is there really left to learn? Luckily for you, I can guarantee that I don’t have an answer to that question! However, with so many worlds of the mystic arts, the factors and elements of the boundless universe we live in, and the absolutely confusing nature that is the “mind-body paradox," we have a bottomless hat of tricks to pull from, with each new rabbit bringing countless new questions along with it. Now, it is true that our world relies on pillars of strong scientific foundational understanding and concepts that make up what we understand to be reality. This is our truth. But it is also true that we have only explored an atomically small fraction of our oceans and universe and have yet to really define what it means to be a human being, whether that be a being of matter or a consciousness beyond the physical plane. While I don’t believe modern-day scientists have the means, time, or support to find the answers to our unending questions in our lifetimes, I find that they are often setting up the minds of the future to have the means and knowledge to do so. 

The power to define the future we lead is in the hands of those who do the thinking as well as those who support said thinking. As Elaine Sevier, a neuroscientist from Harvard, wrote in an essay for her company Research Theory, “Everyone wants to write the classic paper that is still referenced in 100 years. But to advance your career, you need an easily digestible story that will be immediately popular—and you should seek, interpret, and present your data accordingly.” The problem is never that the world is running out of problems to solve or that there are no “disruptive” breakthroughs. The problem is that we live in a world where most of society lives like goldfish, making short-term memory best remedied by short-form, digestible content. Most papers that are referenced are regarded as scientific fact and truth, and to have the ability to advance upon that, scientists need funding and support, which they cannot gain without previous successful work. It is a vicious cycle of needing to pump out ideas and work to prove oneself while getting dismissed as a relatively small step from any previous ideas. Will we ever really appreciate a sequel for what it is? Or will we only focus on how much less “great” it is than the original? Often, trilogies are known to go out with a bang, and I would much rather end up appreciating the world-changing “disruptive scientific findings” we see nearly every day. 

 

  

 

 

 

Works Cited 

Flaherty, Colleen. “Study: ‘Disruptive’ Science Is on the Decline.” Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs, www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/17/study-disruptive-science-decline. Accessed 22 Jan. 2024.  

Flam, F.D. “Have Scientific Breakthroughs Declined?” Bloomberg.Com, Bloomberg, 23 Dec. 2023, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-23/have-scientific-breakthroughs-declined?srnd=undefined. 

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