• INeedMana@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    36
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m not convinced by the premise of this statement

    Scientific innovations should make ‘zero to one’ breakthroughs, such as the mobile phone or the combustion engine, but are instead making ‘one to many’ improvements to existing innovations

    Maybe we are simply past the curve where a few people can innovate a breakthrough and now it has to come from a lot of data gathered from existing implementations? In order to invent a cellphone a lot of technologies had to be improved compared to their first introduction. And get cheap enough to enable experimentation

    • Pennomi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      1 year ago

      Agreed, modern inventions are orders of magnitude more complex than anything in the past. Of course they require teams.

      Like you said, “the mobile phone” isn’t a single invention anyway, it’s thousands or millions of inventions packed into one device.

      • INeedMana@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        modern inventions are orders of magnitude more complex than anything in the past

        Well, in a way that’s always the case with inventions. I think when the first modern submarine (it’s just an example) was built it also was a marvel of alloy purity and manufacturing precision compared to anything in the past. It’s just that in the last century we observed a lot of technological progress because we started doing research in a lot more directions and in much higher volume. We caught up to our technological and theoretical knowledge and now the progress will slow down. Only to explode again after another breakthrough, as we often move in sinusoids, but that will be in one field + how it can help other fields, not a bunch of fields developing all at once in a short timeframe

    • i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      i think what they are trying to say is… because of bureaucratization of research the current method is stuck on improving rather than take risks and thinking outside the box.

      • INeedMana@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        I get that. But my point is: are we really sure that this is the problem?

        One of the bases of our scientific method is repeatability of experiment. But at some point, when we can produce a lot of experiments, comes a problem: we can run out of people with time and resources that allow to repeat it. And one of the ways to mitigate it is to strengthen the requirements on the data gathering. So when you do find something weird, you can analyze how the parameters differ from other similar runs and if someone else is able to repeat it, you might have easier time finding which variable makes it so. Without consistent “we measured X after setting that to Y” it’s hard to repeat the experiment or even recognize if you really are observing something new.

        Take a look at that error a few months ago that resulted in us thinking that a new superconductor that can work in ± room conditions was found. If we didn’t have precise description of what they did and what they measured, we could be still trying to reproduce their observations