I wrote the other day about progress in physics – about the assumptions we all make about it and whether it will bring useful innovations.
There is another possibility I didn’t mention: that, after all the breakthroughs that Einstein and Niels Bohr et al brought us early in the 20th century, and all the fleshing out of that paradigm shift that has taken place since, we get stuck and see no significant additional breakthroughs for centuries no matter how hard we try. Maybe instead of an ever-acclerating pace of innovation, we have actually punched through some barriers, and are still mopping up from that accomplishment – but are now up against new barriers and things will slow down.
What if what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science” never generates a new revolution, because we simply never are able to gather enough pieces of the puzzle to pull it off? (That might be, for example, because each new piece requires another $20 billion supercollider.)
Because we've lived at a time of constant scientific/engineering/technical innovation and discovery – in fact, it has been accelerating since the 14th century – we assume that will always be true. But what if it doesn't? Is that even imaginable?
Innovation always moves with fits and starts in any one area; check out this jetliner – you wouldn't look twice if it flew by today, but it's a de Havilland Comet, the first successful jet airliner, which entered service in 1949. If I had a 1949 computer, there'd be no danger you'd mistake it for something current (to begin with, it would be the size of a small house). But other technologies such as automobiles and refrigerators are still being made today with only refinements to the same basic design as 1949, and earlier. The path to land locomotion was long and steep, but not much has happened on that front since the internal combustion engine came along.
In fact it’s not even clear that technological change is accelerating, as measured by its impact on our lives. Jeff Madrick has written critically of the assumption that the computer revolution is bringing greater changes than ever seen before:
What about the steam engine, which reduced transoceanic and transcontinental travel from a few weeks to a week or less in the nineteenth century? Or the telegraph, to cite just one other of many such inventions? In the 1840s, it took ten days to send a one-page message from New York to Chicago. In the 1850s, after the telegraph was invented, it took a few minutes.
Think too about the effect things like electricity and the car had on people’s lives.
On the other hand, I do think the social effects of the information revolution will be long and deep, at least as long as Moore’s Law holds.
But when it comes to the most basic science, like physics, it could be that we just get stumped and stuck, and that eventually all the engineering and technology implications and permutations of the basic science engine are worked out. It could be that basic science is the sun that powers everything else and its death leads to a long cold death for the other areas too.
Okay, I don’t really believe any of this. But maybe I’m just a man of my time who can't shake his deep-seated assumptions. What if?
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