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Comment by scottrogowski | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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]

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.2181

[2] https://infinityplusonemath.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/no-one-...

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)

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-the-1919-s...

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.

> during the "more innovative" eras of, say, 1800-1950

I think you're starting with the wrong assumptions.

What objective metrics makes you think there is any slow down in innovation?

You may feel like progress is slow, but it's very human to have irrational feelings :)

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.

In the old days grad schools weren't filled with people who are there mostly to get Green Cards.

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