From: Joao Magalhaes (jpnitya@skynet.be)
Date: Tue Jul 23 2002 - 12:08:54 MDT
Hi!
Thanks everyone for your views.
Unfortunately, I'm still unsure as to how we can argue that the 21st
century will be marked by a scientific revolution. As usually, I agree with
Anders: I don't think Kardashev classes are a proper way to predict
scientific output in the 21st century. Counting publications is imperfect
too. After all, only a small percentage of scientific papers leads to
scientific revolutions; in other words, the great majority of papers being
published are of little importance, so why count them? One obvious argument
is to cite all the scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century and claim
the trend will continue. Yet it seems a bit like faith and not reason.
Probably the best argument I can think of is Moore's Law: Computers have
allowed for an increase in knowledge -- e.g. the Human Genome Project. If
Moore's Law holds, then we can expect scientific progress to continue as
higher computers will allow scientist to perform more complex operations
and thus develop more complex theories. Yet no one can guarantee Moore's
Law will hold for the next few decades, so perhaps that book about how
science has reached its limits is right after all. I'll have to think about
this.
All the best.
Joao Magalhaes (joao.magalhaes@fundp.ac.be)
Website on Aging: http://www.senescence.info
Reason's Triumph: http://www.jpreason.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:39 MST