There is a popular argument being made recently that science and innovation are slowing down. If true, the next question is what factors are causing this slow down. The way that Brown was dismissed for (apparently) good research in the 50s feels a lot like the struggles that heterodox academics seem to face today. My question is whether that sort of dismissal and ostracization was common during the "more innovative" eras of, say, 1800-1950. I legitimately don't know. To use some big hitters as examples, I'm unaware of Einstein or Millikan ever dealing with serious questioning of their work. Darwin faced questions but more from non-academics. Freud should have faced more questioning than he actually received.
Is it fair to characterize modern research as having a problem with group-think and if so, how important is that problem in the supposed slow-down of science?
Einstein actually faced fairly stiff opposition to his ideas amongst physicists, especially his ideas about special relativity early in his career, A lot of it was driven by the fact he was an outsider to the physics community at the time. [1]
>This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation." Thus begins a letter by Albert Einstein to his one time close collaborator, mathematician Marcel Grossmann. It was written on 12 September 1920, just some three weeks after Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall had hosted a rambunctious rally at which Einstein had been denounced as a fraud and scientific philistine.
Another good example of a revolutionary innovative thinker of the time being branded a fraud and a charlatan by mainstream voices is Georg Cantor, who was so badly treated he suffered mental illness for much of the rest of his life because of how completely his theories had been rejected. [2]
True. One of the reasons why the solar eclipse experiments were so important is that they corroborated Einstein's theory, but I don't think there was any prior proof of Relativity except for the known discrepancies (Mercury's orbit and the failure to measure ether velocity)
Thank you for the well-informed comment. This is exactly what I was looking for. I'm probably incorrect to think that ossification in science has somehow gotten worse. People are people, after-all.
While progress is difficult to quantify (and is therefore often subjective), I certainly don't think the argument about whether or not there is a slowdown is "irrational"
Here is a list of scientific discoveries / innovations made during the 1800-1950 period off the top of my head:
- Steam engine
- Indoor plumbing
- Penicillin
- Electricity
- Internal combustion engine
- Transistor
- Theory of evolution
- Heavier-than-air flight
- Electromagnetism
- Splitting the atom
- Skyscrapers (The Strasbourg cathedral was the previous record holder for world's tallest building. That cathedral was started in the late middle ages)
- Metro systems
- Vaccinations
- Jet engine
- Typewriter
- Dishwasher
- Telegraph
- Open heart surgery
- Plastics
- And so many more...
Since 1950, the consequential innovations I can think of are
- Artificial satellites
- Computers
- The internet
- Smart phones
Certainly all four are meaningful but are they, combined, as consequential as what happened over the previous decades?
I think that one measure you could use is whether life would be more unrecognizable between 2020 and 1950 or between 1950 and 1880. I would argue that 1880, when life expectancy was still under 50 years at birth, when manure pollution was a major problem in NYC, and right before that city was electrified, was far more different for the average person than 1950 when we lacked our modern electronic niceties.
It's hard to compare modern groupthink with the past.
Today, nobody is going to get burned at the stake if they say something unorthodox, like claiming that the world is flat. They might die in a rocket crash if they try to prove it, but the inquisition isn't going to get on their case for defying the scriptures.
We might be getting more risk-averse, though. My grandparents' fun childhood memories were of sitting on the tails of fighter planes to help them take off, hopping the iron curtain, and throwing bricks at exposed light bulbs in freshly-bombed buildings. Those were the days when science really happened...
There is so much rubbish being published nowadays, albeit in complacent journals, that nobody pays attention.
Back in 'those' times, academic research was carried out by respected universities/organizations, and should you publish unorthodox things, you would have received serious scrutiny by peers, coworkers, hierarchy. Now you can publish rubbish, typically in niche psychology journals, and nobody will blame you. Everyone is so eager to publish so why not aiming at easy targets.
It’s unfortunate the pressure researchers suffer to not come across as cranks that can derail a field. His colleagues feared his theories would discredit the nascent field of chronobiology.
Brown’s peers even ran an experiment that corroborated Brown’s hypothesis but kept it secret.
Looks like Brown is being tentatively vindicated —it’s not completely understood but it appears he was on to something circadian rhythms are somehow influenced by magnetic fields in some species.
Things like this are what I find exciting these days. It says to me that the surrounding universe has a greater presence in our lives than we’d guess, and the implications are huge. How much do we take for granted? How much of the world isn’t originating from the world alone? In a way this seems somewhat obvious, yet, I’d never have guessed that oysters are synchronized with something that seems so distant and external. There’s so much left to learn and understand.
The strongest tidal influences (m2,s2,n2) are all about around 12.5 hours, i.e. about half of the discovered cycle of 25. So it seems weird that the moon theory was so easily dismissed. It doesn't even get a mention in the article.
The question that arises is how much are our internal systems disrupted by living in a sea of electromagnetic radiation from tv transmitters, radio transmitters, mobile phones and towers, wifi etc
Well his suggests that the oysters would Likely not be affected as they weren’t responding to signals. Birds, i believe, navigate with a compass so could suffer disruption
The more we learn of life, biology, chemistry and especially physics, the more interesting life becomes. Today it's harder to separate complete nonsense from a reality that hasn't reached sufficient consensus. All the reasons for rejecting Brown were right at the time, but ultimately life turned out to be more complex than people realized back then. Science ultimately is about finding what's real and what's a temporary illusion of reality.
The article is an excerpt from a new book by Jo Marchant, a PhD/BSc microbiology/genetics who apparently has made a name for herself writing popular science books that intermingle covering a subject with covering the science history and the colorful personalities involved.
Like you I enjoyed this piece tremendously, then discovered this info via the byline below and ended up buying three of her books, including this new one. I started her older book on King Tut's Mummy last night and it's equally fun so far (it's about the discoveries of and research about this and related mummies, and their relationship to the science news cycle - so you get stuff about ancient DNA and that scene of science along with an inspection of popular Egyptology). The third book I bought is about the Antikythera Mechanism.
This author might end up giving me a similar popsci fix as Simon Singh did as a kid! :)
Side note, if you end up picking the King Tut book, this blog series is a fantastic companion adopting a similar approach to the topic of the Pyramids and their research history:
This is the side project of Jimmy Maher, better known as the author of the Digital Antiquarian blog. Under the guise of Analog Antiquarian he wrote this and is now writing further history books in chapter-as-blog form about the Seven World Wonders of antiquity. It's some of the best reading I did last year, and since some of the historic characters overlap with Marchant's book they end up combining into a fuller picture for me currently.
I love this genre - learning about history via the history of the historians and researchers. You learn about the subject as well as of the twists and turns of how the present day knowledge was amassed. Singh, but also Neal Stephenson novels to some extent (couched in fiction), etc. And, though more of a witness' account rather than critical writing, the favorite book of my youth, John Chadwick's "The Decipherment of Linear B".
Is it fair to characterize modern research as having a problem with group-think and if so, how important is that problem in the supposed slow-down of science?