(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

I keep hearing people proposing ideas that sound, roughly, like "back in the 19th century people were revolutionising scientific fields every other week working alone or with a handful of assistants, now we don't do that even with huge teams of scientists working together, therefore we need to [read the classics/bring back the aristocracy/whatever other thing 19th century scientists did we don't do any more]"

and y'know i'm not gonna declare that 21st century scientific practice has no problems. but it seems to me that if there's One Weird Trick (or N weird tricks) that let you become the modern-day equivalent of Darwin or Maxwell or Laplace then surely someone out there would be doing that? even if the entire scientific apparatus is broken there's people outside it who are curious about things and free to do whatever they want; some of them are already rich and don't need to work for a living and so have all the free time required. Why aren't those people unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity?

I know what my answer is: because unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity is hard, and for the most part all the things that are easy to discover already have been and we're left with the stuff that requires a dozen people working together, or a budget to build a giant particle accelerator, or a huge scientific community exploring conceptspace in parallel.

You can say "yeah, it doesn't work if you're outside the scientific establishment entirely, you need access to some institutional resources, but the people who do have those resources could do a lot better" but at that point it kind of seems like you're admitting that doing science did get harder since the 19th century, not because people are doing it wrong but because we're answering different questions, and if so then the appeal of "well it worked back then" vanishes and you have to argue for your proposal on merits other than its 19th century track record.

(alternatively you can declare that they have gotten amazing results and our scientific process is so broken that not only are we unable to discover things but also if someone had a unified theory of everything and published it without institutional affiliation nobody would acknowledge it even to plagiarise it. i am sceptical but you can)

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Hell, if you go back to Ancient Greece, you don't even need to have, like, experimental setups and interactions with institutions that would verify your ideas, you could just come up with wild guesses about metaphysics and start teaching them and then there was a reasonable chance you'd have poked at a profound and useful insight onto which all future knowledge was built. Why don't we try and do things *that* way?

[impossiblewizardry]

I think stuff of equal importance accomplished by individuals or small teams has just been happening consistently. Like unifying gravity with other forces is hard--worth noting that Einstein tried and failed, so its not like they had special powers back then--but imo stuff as important has kept happening.

I just dont think ppl realize how different these theories were when first proposed. You couldnt DO anything with the schrodinger equation. He solved hydrogen and didnt even make it to helium. And people who knew darwin's theory but not population genetics said extremely bizarre stuff that doesn't make sense to us now.

It's just that the way things are narrativized, the intellectual work that has allowed us to actually use these theories in the real world doesn't make it into popular science books.

My own personal big example would be density functional theory, a nobel prize in the 80s. Its how hard QM calculations are done these days, and would have been unrecognizable to schrodinger. But that's just cause i do quantum chemistry now, I'm sure there's examples in every field.

Oh another is the coalescent process for modeling allele frequency changes. Would have made no sense to Darwin. Fisher probably would have thought it was brilliant and wished he could have thought of it. It's how we actually calculate evolution stuff most of the time. Again: 1980s!

You've probably never heard of these things and neither have the people wondering what happened to scientific progress by individual thinkers.

I guess what I'm saying is: if we ran out of problems at individual-scientist-thinking-hard-level, it wasn't until the 1980s at least. (Which is also when the Standard Model stopped changing...)