Will science end?

[Radar]

One of the ways I'd define "scientific progress" is that certain questions become settled. Yes, each answer raises two new questions, but those questions aren't equal to the first one, they're harder to answer and less important. Like partially filling a hole so there are two gaps on the sides; yes you have a larger number holes, but you have less hole.

Eventually, we will reach limits. The next experiment will expensive. The knowledge gained too niche. As others have said, this won't happen in our lives.

When the next dark age comes(assuming we're not completely wiped out) we'll go through it knowing much more that we did in the last dark age, and probably more than we do now.

There is a false assumption here that there is nothing fundamentally new to discover - that there will be no paradigm shift like, for example, with quantum physics. That false assumption is manifested in the more specific assumption that the hole we fill is finite and that any answer we get covers some significant portion thereof.

I recall, and Im not sure if this anecdote is true, but I recall hearing an anecdote about how during the decade or so before quantum physics and relativity were discovered the concensus was that physics had been more or less completely solved. And then of course relativity and quantum weirdness were discovered and uended everything

That was indeed the notion back than with just a few small problems waiting to be solved: black body radiation and some mathematical issues with emergence of magnetic monopoles in Maxwell's electrodynamics.

The same thing happened in chemistry, where it was believed that almost everything was already researched except the goopy (not the word they used for sure) stuff -> all of organic chemistry. And even in the inorganic chemistry there are still amazing things happening.

[Ionathus]

The same thing happened in chemistry, where it was believed that almost everything was already researched except the goopy (not the word they used for sure) stuff -> all of organic chemistry. And even in the inorganic chemistry there are still amazing things happening.

Complete nonsequitur, but I would be over the moon if colleges and universities would rename their Organic Chemistry courses to be "Goopy Stuff Chemistry" courses. Probably pull in more applicants, too. All the better to break them, if my pre-med friends' experience with O-Chem is anything to go by! :D

[Radar]

Complete nonsequitur, but I would be over the moon if colleges and universities would rename their Organic Chemistry courses to be "Goopy Stuff Chemistry" courses. Probably pull in more applicants, too. All the better to break them, if my pre-med friends' experience with O-Chem is anything to go by! :D

That might actually work.

If some university hired Colin Furze to teach some engineering classes, they would also surely get way more applicants.

edit: only now I have seen the white text. Organic chemistry is indeed often one of the hardest subjects in chemistry the same way analog circuits are for electronics students. Still, at least at my technical university most students struggled with Physics 101 of all things. That being said, what does not kill you, makes you stronger.

[Quizatzhaderac]

That seems logical but what do humans do after that. Descend into hedonism?

I'd expect this to be so gradual that would never seem like a question for society at large. Also, I'm not sure I'd consider "hedonism" well defined for humanity as a whole.

For example at some point inorganic chemistry has gone from learning about nature to engineer new things never in nature. I'm sure some individuals needed to come to the realization that there wasn't much to research, and that they should focus their careers on organic chemistry, quantum chemistry, or applications, but there was no clear "this is done moment".

As for what people will do, I expect some more hedonism. But "finishing" science isn't the same as "finishing" engineering, and if we finish engineering, our needs might change making new engineering worthwhile.

Even if we "finished" political theory, that doesn't mean politics stops. Unpredictable things may still happen with the best achievable theory. Even the optimal political system might require significant work to maintain.

Out practical needs will still require some effort. While generally people have preferred meeting their needs as efficiently as possible, I'm not convinced people actually want it to be zero effort.

Finally, I expect attempts at science to continue past peak science. People will develop new theory that are just isomorphs to old one. Or people will work on problems that are proven to have no import out of a love for the idea of science.

There is a false assumption here that there is nothing fundamentally new to discover - that there will be no paradigm shift like, for example, with quantum physics. That false assumption is manifested in the more specific assumption that the hole we fill is finite and that any answer we get covers some significant portion thereof.

You're still assuming all questions are of equal value. Discovering QM raised many questions, but the value of those answers depends on prior answers. The QM hole seems bigger now only because of your perspective which puts everything before QM and relativity in the "trivial" bucket and out of sight.

QM absolutely solves more questions than classical mechanics (as classical mechanics is, in a sense a special case of QM), but these new questions are by definition inferior because they're further away from human experience. There's no science without empiricism and there's no empiricism without experience.

[Radar]

You're still assuming all questions are of equal value. Discovering QM raised many questions, but the value of those answers depends on prior answers. The QM hole seems bigger now only because of your perspective which puts everything before QM and relativity in the "trivial" bucket and out of sight.

Not really. I just assume that the set of unknowns is not known and we cannot reasonable asses its size or predict if it is finite at all.

QM absolutely solves more questions than classical mechanics (as classical mechanics is, in a sense a special case of QM), but these new questions are by definition inferior because they're further away from human experience. There's no science without empiricism and there's no empiricism without experience.

There is no connection between significance of a question (or an answer) and direct human experience; not sure why you assume that at all. Empiricism also has not much to do with everyday experience - it is about the need to conduct well designed experiments more often than not performed in highly controlled conditions in order to falsify a given theory.

Significance of a problem in science is more about how widely encountered it is or (more importantly) how many narrow fields would the answer influence.

And I would not say that quantum mechanics is detached from our everyday lives - our whole modern society relies on it as electronics could not have been developed without it at all. Without quantum mechanics there would be no understanding of semiconductors or the idea of a transistor. We would not have lasers and many, many other things we take for granted and do not even notice around us. It is also important to remember that QM was the first theory capable of giving the whole chemistry proper grounding - without QM chemistry would be just a collection of empirical bits and pieces without any way of being unified into a coherent theoretical framework without which we would not be able to fully study and design new materials.

Even advancements in mathematics have significant applications as we could not have the Internet as it is without a proper foundation. Most development of novel algorithms is also pure mathematics.

[TaiLiu]

There are analogues to Gödel's theorem (and the Halting Theorem and other related theorems) for finite systems, though. What it fundamentally comes down to is that even though a part of a system can, to a degree, model the whole system, and a system can sometimes completely model a smaller system, no system, whether finite or infinite, can completely model itself. And we, the ones who are doing the modeling, are a part of the entire Universe.

Sorry, I don't understand. Could you explain in more detail how Gödel's incompleteness theorem explains why science will never end? :O

[BananaPhone]

One of the biggest questions that keeps me up at night is whether science will "end" and there will be no more discoveries to be made. I fear this because I use science as a sort-of religion to keep me happy and sane. I also believe that if our society stagnates in progress, it will mean the end of us as a species.

Its of course, impossible to tell if science will end as time will continue and we will only know when that comes to an end. However, are there any clues that may lead to us concluding that the universe is infinite or finite in complexity.

Someone gave an argument for it being infinite-"Believing that science has covered most or all the fundamentals is short-sighted and probably wrong. It is similar to saying "we have come to the last number"

Someone also gave an argument for it being finite-"Yes. It is true. There will be significant details which will emerge to tweak the systems a bit but the grand narrative is coming to its end. Science had a beginning and it will have an end. We will always hit a limitation of time and space."

Who do you believe is correct. I can't decide. I am 50/50, more divided than I've ever been in life.

As someone who works in science-based academia...I beseech and implore you with all the earnest at my command to turn away from this portion of society and cease to treat it as your fountain of happiness lol. Get married, have kids, join a community at church, talk to your neighbors, volunteer for community service, read books at an old persons home, do meals on wheels, grow vegetables in your backyard and sell them at farmers markets etc do something, anything that forges meaningful connections to others in your proximity, but don't rely on our growing understanding and ability to manipulate/work with creation as a religious source of happiness and sanity lol.

Science is a tool to understand, manipulate, work with and exploit creation to our benefit, and I contribute to it as best as I can. Science is wonderful, but it is not to be worshiped, nor are those of us within its apparatus - we're human, fallible and vulnerable to all the vices of man, from envy, to pride, greed and wrath.

That little speech aside, the answer is never. Science is cataloguing and understanding the natural processes and behaviours of the natural world. Even if we nuke ourselves back into the stone age and 99.99% of humans on earth perish in the calamity, that still leaves ~780,000 of us across the world learning which rocks are best to strike together and at what angle so that fire can be sparked, meat can be cooked, spears can be carbonized and torches can be used to keep the mutant wolves at bay while we throw our javelins at them. We survived the ice age equipped with little more than animal skins and pointy sticks - we're pretty good at long-term comebacks.

The other direction is continuing on our current path, where we'll probably end up uploading our minds via neuralink into computers and cloning/growing new bodies we can download ourselves into for essential immortality. Even in such a fantastical outcome, there'll always be more to learn and more to discover. There is a literal galaxy out there of things to discover and learn, and we, out here on our spiral-arm of the Milky Way are billions of years behind and 25,000-28,000 light years away from the centre of that galaxy. The more you understand, the more you realise how very little we know.

[Bohandas]

via neuralink

Or some equivalent that's not strongly associated with a known charlatan and con artist

[BananaPhone]

Or some equivalent that's not strongly associated with a known charlatan and con artist

In your opinion. The point is that that technology is being actively worked on and is heading our way over the coming decades. Barring some world-wide economic calamity or war that resets us to 1900 levels of interconnectedness or something, that technology will happen in the coming decades.

It'll start off expensive, as new big tech always does. Cars, computers, mobile phones, laptops etc. But it'll eventually get so cheap and reliable it'll be as equally as wide-spread.

Honestly, you know in Cyberpunk 2077 how everyone, even hillbillies living in trailers on the fringe of cities, have USB ports in their heads and a connective cord they can withdraw from their forearm? Personal opinion is that that's probably going to happen this century. Pure opinion, mind you.

[Bohandas]

Yeah probably. But it's not gonna come from Neuralink. I don't know if you've noticed but all of Musk's products that actually work were purchased by him after they were already mature with the money he got from his dad, whereas the stuff developed under his own management tends to crash into walls and catch fire. AFAIK he's been with neuralink since the beginning; they haven't got a snowball's chance in Hell.

[Radar]

Science is a tool to understand, manipulate, work with and exploit creation to our benefit, and I contribute to it as best as I can. Science is wonderful, but it is not to be worshiped, nor are those of us within its apparatus - we're human, fallible and vulnerable to all the vices of man, from envy, to pride, greed and wrath.

Well said. I could not put this better together.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

When I was 20 an in-brain computer interface still sounded like something I would want. Now it just sounds like an expensive way to get myself more addicted to Youtube while they're selling my every thought to advertizers. And after I crash my car while being too engaged with my in-brain computer law inforcement will read out my location and activity feed from the server and I'll be convicted, but I miss a night of sleep in the police cell which makes me miss a security update so I die from an infection caused by some overheating or minor electric jolt that a virus managed to cause.

An extension of my thinking with more calculating and formal logic power with very limited if any connectivity to the outside world might still sound a little awesome, but I'll probably be too old to like even that idea by the time it comes around. I've been living in the future for the past 24 years after all (yes, the future began in the year 2000, when else?), and I don’t know what I expected, but how it's turning out is starting to wear on me.

[Bohandas]

It's like electric cars, gmo foods, social media, or the music industry. They're not inherently bad but they're connected to some very very bad people.

EDIT:

I've been living in the future for the past 24 years after all (yes, the future began in the year 2000, when else?), and I don’t know what I expected, but how it's turning out is starting to wear on me.

I think the kicker is that they never warned us that the cyberpunk dystopia would also be boring

When I was 20 an in-brain computer interface still sounded like something I would want. Now it just sounds like an expensive way to get myself more addicted to Youtube while they're selling my every thought to advertizers. And after I crash my car while being too engaged with my in-brain computer law inforcement will read out my location and activity feed from the server and I'll be convicted, but I miss a night of sleep in the police cell which makes me miss a security update so I die from an infection caused by some overheating or minor electric jolt that a virus managed to cause.

In my experience software updates cause malfunctions and security problems, not prevent them. Every update makes it harder for you to access your device's inner workings and easier for the equipment manufacturer to access them. It's basically ransomware except you can't pay your way out of it even in theory.

[Trafalgar]

Well, according to this paper in the journal Nature, the pace of scientific discoveries is in decline.

[NichG]

Well, according to this paper in the journal Nature, the pace of scientific discoveries is in decline.

Going into the metric they're using, it feels like 'it's complicated'. They're saying that the disruptiveness of work is decreasing, and they measure disruptiveness in a certain way: the degree to which future papers cite a given focal work but also stop citing the predecessors of that focal work.

That's not necessarily the same as saying that the pace of discovery is in decline. It might be saying that the rate of *transformative* discovery is in decline. Or it might just be saying that there are now so many papers that any individual paper just isn't getting picked up consistently enough to transform a field on its own, and the transformative objects now might be sets of connected work rather than a single revolutionary discovery - which would be my bet (especially given evolving lab practices and the emergence of the 'minimal publishable unit' style of work).

[Lvl 2 Expert]

That's not necessarily the same as saying that the pace of discovery is in decline. It might be saying that the rate of *transformative* discovery is in decline.

It could even mean that we won't realize what a huge upset some discoveries meant until 20 years from now. So I agree, "it depends".

Yet, the idea itself isn't weird. Many things in nature eventually produce an "S-curve", things stay nearly the same for a while, but progress is being made, and at some point progress goes faster and faster until the point of equilibrium, after which it gets slower and slower, eventually settling around some sort of maximum. For some fields I don't think it's weird to say we're in the part that gets slower already. We can do steel constructions better and cooler than the Eiffel tower now, but let's be honest, not that much better and cooler. Moore's law is bringing us to the limits of (digital) computing speeds (despite the very impressive things we're still developing to do with that speed) and even in a field like the development of antidepressants we're still trying to squeeze the last bits of usefulness out of discoveries done around the sixties.

Then again, sometimes you just need multiple S-curves to get where you're going. In the case of that last example for instance more knowledge about our brains should eventually unlock much more powerful options, but for now we've seem to stalled out a bit. There's also of course the option of a "singularity" type event where AI developing better and better AI brings renewed progress in every field. But even that is just another new S-curve. The same with the boom we might get from say building a Dyson sphere and filling it with quadrillions of humans.

As stated before, I think it's literally impossible to ever run out of things to discover, even if you're an immortal brain made up out of all of the matter in the universe. But I do think it's possible for technological progress within fields or even as a whole to stall out.

[NichG]

I think a lot of the exponential phases like Moore's law have more to do with the positive feedback of people seeing a particular field being lucrative and in turn directing more money and effort towards it, than the results of the tech directly bootstrapping it's own advances.

Like, AI has gone exponential or even hyperexponential in various metrics (resolution of generated images or LLM context lengths for example) but that's largely because we went from stuff you can train on a single GPU in a week to investing millions of dollars into a single experiment. While there have been some attempts at bootstrapping, using AI to make better training or hyperparameter search or architecture design, they haven't really caught on much.

So I suppose the ending-or-not thing is less, are we hitting the top of a particular sigmoid, and more about what determines the rate at which new sigmoids are started...

[Bartmanhomer]

I don't think science will ever end. Not even by a long shot.

[halfeye]

I think the universe will eventually end, and I'm not sure that it will be impossible for life to escape that end, so possibly science will end with the universe, but otherwise, not.

[Bohandas]

I think the universe will eventually end, and I'm not sure that it will be impossible for life to escape that end, so possibly science will end with the universe, but otherwise, not.

https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH

[Radar]

https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH

This is great! I read the story before, but I did not know that someone made a comics out of it.

[Mordar]

If we define the galaxy as my system, and a star as a particle, then I have achieved supernova power a great many times. My work is elegant in its simplicity.

It is Academic Misconduct to take credit for someone else's work. You didn't even try to cite me...

That seems logical but what do humans do after that. Descend into hedonism?

Only if there is a divinity, or collection thereof, I don't care which, looking out for us.

An extension of my thinking with more calculating and formal logic power with very limited if any connectivity to the outside world might still sound a little awesome, but I'll probably be too old to like even that idea by the time it comes around. I've been living in the future for the past 24 years after all (yes, the future began in the year 2000, when else?), and I don’t know what I expected, but how it's turning out is starting to wear on me.

Sadly I firmly believe WALL-E to be the most accurate predictor of our future (I mean, maybe Terminator, but probably WALL-E).

On topic, I am greatly pleased that the public perception in the 1920s had it that we held the keys to all of the universe and that man had effectively completed the climb to the top of the mountain. I am happy about this because it begat the C'thulhu Mythos, and that has brought me great joy over the decades of my life. I also like the calcium-calmodulin system in skeletal muscle. So I'm good with both sides of the conversation.

- M

[Lord Torath]

On topic, I am greatly pleased that the public perception in the 1920s had it that we held the keys to all of the universe and that man had effectively completed the climb to the top of the mountain. I am happy about this because it begat the C'thulhu Mythos, and that has brought me great joy over the decades of my life.

"This is what happens when you don't have the 'constitution for math'."
(Overly Sarcastic Productions)

[Bohandas]

Sadly I firmly believe WALL-E to be the most accurate predictor of our future (I mean, maybe Terminator, but probably WALL-E).

Probably Paranoia. Maybe Futurama

[Peelee]

It is Academic Misconduct to take credit for someone else's work. You didn't even try to cite me...

Oh dear. I beg your forgiveness. Let me attend to that post haste.

My work is elegant in its simplicity. - Peelee et al.

Imean, really, your contribution is negligible, so that was a kindness.

[Radar]

On topic, I am greatly pleased that the public perception in the 1920s had it that we held the keys to all of the universe and that man had effectively completed the climb to the top of the mountain. I am happy about this because it begat the C'thulhu Mythos, and that has brought me great joy over the decades of my life. I also like the calcium-calmodulin system in skeletal muscle. So I'm good with both sides of the conversation.

- M

i'd say in the 1920's that notion of science being complete was being actively crushed to bits. And this sudden opening of our worldview to the great unknown was probably fueling Lovecraft's paranoia. List of some things changing in science in the early 20th century:
1. Newton's mechanics being replaced. Twice. With both new theories leading to a completely new view of the universe.
2. Milky Way being proven to be just one of many, many galaxies in a universe way bigger than anyone thought before.
3. Discovery of the universe evolving in time (see Hubble's law) -> not being always there and staying the same forever.
4. While evolution in biology was discovered and first described in the 19th century it was still in the process of being accepted by the scientific community and general society. The idea of humans being special among living beings was difficult to let go... or someone needed to invent a more sophisticated reason to feel special.

[Murk]

A related, but probably easier-to-answer question: are there any specific fields of science that have already ended?

Like, a branch of science or a field of study that you wouldn't be able to write a bachelor thesis in, because everything has already been written. All the questions have been answered, other than "how do we apply this to other fields?"

Because after three million years of research and three hundred years of science, if we haven't even completed a single specific topic, then I'm pretty confident we won't ever finish.

I'm thinking, maybe, the Statics branch of Classical Mechanics? Or Euclidian Geometry? Does that still have any open questions? It seems largely solved to me.

[halfeye]

A related, but probably easier-to-answer question: are there any specific fields of science that have already ended?

Two to start with:

Astrology. Never really was a science, but there are still believers even though it's been thoroughly debunked.

Alchemy: Was an attempt at a science, but made some basic assumptions that turned out not to be true.

[NichG]

Anyone publishing new results in Trigonometry these days?

[veti]

Two to start with:

Astrology. Never really was a science, but there are still believers even though it's been thoroughly debunked.

Alchemy: Was an attempt at a science, but made some basic assumptions that turned out not to be true.

There is a scientific side to astrology: it's about modelling and predicting the movement of the planets. Yes, I think it's reasonable to call that a solved problem. Modulo the discovery of new planets/redefinition of existing ones, which clearly has the potential to spring more surprises on us yet.

Alchemy evolved into modern chemistry, I don't know if you can draw a line somewhere and say "Alchemy ended here". There's a mystical side of self-improvement and meditation, which spun off away from the field of science entirely (although you could maybe trace it into parts of modern pharmacology), but in so far as it was ever about "science", I suspect it's still going.