Is Science Dying?

Is science coming to an end? On the one hand, it seems like scientific progress has slowed to a crawl and no big breakthroughs are happening any more. On the other hand, we are left with many unsolved problems in science that I am pretty sure have a solution. In this video I explain why I think that we need to seriously consider the possibility that we live in the final phase of scientific discovery.

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00:00 Intro
00:31 What does it mean that science might end?
03:23 Reasons why science might be ending
04:49 Reasons why science might not be ending
10:04 New Laws of Nature, Waiting To Be Discovered
11:53 So then why worry?
13:09 Why does it matter

#science

[you-dont-know-me]

I am a researcher just after PhD, and I am very disappointed to see most academics just doing bad science to get quick publications. Noone wants to do hard and often fruitless, but properly and rigorously done research anymore because you'd spend years on single publication which apparently doesn't matter nowadays.

[musthaf]

My professor is somewhat secretive with some of our projects because he is afraid that someone else’s from a better funded lab might steal his idea and then publish first. Imagine doing proper rigorous and time consuming research and finding out someone published it first, and then suddenly your works means nothing because no high impact journal is willing to publish second discovery. That constant fear that your work might some day became meaningless is what drove me away from academia

[MichaelEdelman]

I saw this trend 40 years ago, when I was in grad school. The head of a lab I worked in was a master at getting funding and having our papers published, but uninterested in advancing knowledge about how things actually worked. I knew a lot of researchers in a range of fields who were very successful at nibbling away at details, refining what were well-known and well understood processes. All a consequence of the modern University research model in which departments are rewarded for bringing in grant money.

[nyralee]

God! Seeing this video just brought life to my eyes. Im a 16 year old highschool student, and i was just pondering this question the other day while i studied protostars, that, all major discoveries in science, like the existence of neutrons snd wave-particle duality and developments of fields such as psychology and neuroscience have been done, so it really does feel like the world of scientific research had come to a seemingly endless standstill. And this sort of worried me as although I am very interested pursuing scientific research as a career (as opposed to being a therapist or cardiologist, both fields I considered but decided to leave because they didn't satisfy my desire to rake through the universe to know all that I can, or die trying) what if all that becomes of the career is begging behind grants and glossing over previously done research. But the bigger problem for me has been 'what kind of scientific research', because I'm studying several fileds of science at highschool level: Biology, Chemistry, Advanced Mathematics, Sociology, and Psychology, and surprisingly enough I see links between all of them that are so intricately designed and hence picking just one pure field to go into seems impossible. How can I just pick one when I want to comprehend how consciousness works and how we define reality and what the relation between our biochemical and biophysical and our social and political world is, I want to quantify social reality and counciousness. And personally, I believe, most of the answers to our current problems come from the advancement of science in this 'chaos and complexity' gap that you defined, and I'm so glad that I watched this video because although these ideas of working on studying 'biological systems, life, consciousness, society, and politics' in this particular frame has plagued me insanely, it's very difficult to translate them out loud, let alone for them to be taken seriously in a country where the appreciation for natural sciences and basics has just started to arise. And more to say, the most difficult part is choosing out majors/subjects to take as I get to higher education, because as far as I am aware, I haven't seen any university majors or the like that explore these ideas, save for the very segregated 'social sciences' and 'stem' majors. English is not my first language and so although I'm proficient (mostly) in writing and comprehension, I have severely lacked the scientific vocabulary required to research further into these ideas, (for example, chaos and complexity' theory) so thank you for providing them. I think I have a whole weekend of articles and lectures ahead of me now!!

[MedlifeCrisis]

It’s interesting to hear your perspective from physics, as I would also rebut Horgan’s claim from a biology point of view. I think the forthcoming century will see dramatic leaps in our understanding and manipulation of biology. Ones I don’t think civilisation is even ethically ready for. I found Horgan’s writing when I was quite young and he was very influential on my early views on science, but as I actually started doing science and went into full time research, I started to realise that he brings quite a significant bias to his views. Which is not at all to say that his criticisms of modern science *as it’s currently undertaken* are invalid (and also some of the things you touched on at the end), indeed I totally agree.

[Xanoxis]

At relatively early stage I noticed this problem of complexity, and lack of honesty in society regarding it. People treat complex problems as something solvable, even though we have no idea how to even approach it, and at best, try to simplify things blindly, and hope it does something. But correlation doesn't mean causation, and all that.

And it's everywhere, politics, economy, science, managing workforce, daily life or emotions. Nobody really wants to honestly say we have no idea how this works, that it is not perfect, and to together try to figure it out, with making some sacrifices. Nah, it's better to proclaim you know all the answers, sell your voodoo, and break shit.

[richardharris]

"... my idea of a complex problem is saying no to a dinner invitation." I'm with you 100%, Sabine.

[resilientfarmsanddesignstu]

I really like Sabine. She’s not afraid to talk straight about complex problems. One of the few that does. I like that! 😀

[sabledawn]

When I worked as a strategic planner for IBM in 1990, they sent me to a class on technical and scientific strategic planning. There I learned that technological advances through the ages were marked by short-term sharp and rapid increases in capability, often prompted by some crisis, followed by very long periods of relatively little advancement. In 1990, the creators of the study suggested we had just entered such a short-term period (the information age), and within a few decades thereafter, the advances would slow down for decades.

I don't think science is dead; I think it has begun a period of incremental advancement until the next crisis (war, climate) stimulates another rapid phase.

[manmanman]

I remember that there already was a time long ago where scientists thought that science has ended and that future scientific progress would only lie in discovering the 15th decimal of some constant. That was in the 19th century and shortly afterwards we discovered relativity and quantum mechanics. So, you'll never know what lies ahead.

[jameshart]

One of my physics teachers (higher-level undergrad physics class) paraphrased the complexity problem as "We've figured out to take the universe apart. We still don't really know how to put it back together, though."

I hope we make progress on that front, though. It's fascinating.

[alextaws]

I appreciate you SO SO much, Sabine!! Thank you for talking about these things - they are essential! Unfortunately, as @you-dont-know-me already pointed out, the skill (or willingness?...) of actual scientific thinking as opposed to just filling out forms which happen to be "scientific" articles is very rare.
I notice this when reading literature - almost all "wow! ok, now this/that makes sense!" moments I've had so far come when reading papers from the 20-60ies on methods or content. Unfortunately, the reason why I have to go back to these sources is because I have to reconstruct why seemingly nonsensical procedures or interventions are practiced - and then I find that the intent/core of the original sound idea got lost and twisted over time into bullshit, pardon my french. (I work in psychology/social sciences.) And I am in a very luxurious and unique position that I don't have to publish, so I can take my time to understand something and think (and read) about it, so no shade thrown on colleagues!
One other major reason for this is, I am quite sure, that there is a considerable fear of math/logic/... among the students and researchers in my field - which of course is catastrophic when you work with chaotic/complex systems and don't have even basic quantitative thinking skills (I only mention the NHST as - still - by far the most common statistical analysis method).
So please, continue making videos like this one (or about the overemphasis of mathematical beauty in physics etc.), you are one of few contemporary scientists who enormously enrich my thinking! Again, thank you very, very much!

[eimextd]

Many years ago I picked up a small book by Dirac, Directions in Physics, to read on an airplane trip. He suggested that in the early days of physics an average physicist could do great physics, while today (1980) it took a great physicist to do average physics.

[MarkRLeach]

Thank you. As a 65 year old chemist, I would say that 'complexity', or the recognition that complex systems are everywhere, is possibly the greatest advance in science during my career because of the change in context it brings. Most interesting to hear your views on this matter in 2023.

[FAS]

When I worked in research, we had two distinct funding streams, one was looking for unknown solutions to known problems, and the other was directed towards finding the unknown unknowns.

[ComsiCaterpillar]

Been in science for decades. Since say 2017 I've noticed a wave of "science believers" that believe in science as a religion. They're usually recent converts and motivated by the culture war, usually they grew up religious, got into New Age / astrology and then "converted" to "believing in science". These dogmatic trendies really annoy me. I don't "believe in science", I'm an atheist and a skeptic, science is a method not a set of beliefs. Science isn't "right", or else you'd know everything already and we could stop learning. Science embraces being wrong so it can learn more and derive a more accurate model and body of knowledge. These science "believers" disturb me

[TheBackyardChemist]

One of the worse ways science could end is if society stops seeing science as valuable or important.

[petermariner]

Learning about Chaos and Complexity changed everything for me. I had so many moments where I just shouted out "YES!" after reading something, it was almost like the sorts of religious revelations the devout claim to have experienced. The implications of what Edward Lorenz discovered remain profound, and his claim that long-term weather forecasting is doomed stands. Despite all the modern computing power available to us, we have managed to extend forecasts by about 2 days.

[rubixmann]

I’m reminded of this 2018 piece titled “Train PhD students to be thinkers not just specialists”, published as a “World View” article in Nature. It starts with an executive summary: “Many doctoral curricula aim to produce narrowly focused researchers rather than critical thinkers. That can and must change, says Gundula Bosch.”

She states: “Under pressure to turn out productive lab members quickly, many PhD programmes … have shortened their courses, squeezing out opportunities for putting research into its wider context. Consequently, most PhD curricula are unlikely to nurture the big thinkers and creative problem-solvers that society needs.”

In summary: we “need to put the philosophy back into the doctorate of philosophy: that is, the ‘Ph’ back into the PhD.”

[seahog]

The serious topic of the video aside, "my idea of a complex problem is saying no to a dinner invitation" is pure gold!