The Oil Drum

I find it astonishing to claim a "dramatic drop off in major scientific discoveries in the last two decades".

What Horgan is saying is that most, if not all, really major discoveries have already been discovered. And virtually all new scientific discoveries comes from just filling in the blanks.

Exactly, and that makes him an obsolete preacher.

Second, both of these arguments rely on civilization-wide measures and averages of knowledge and progress.

I've never thought either one of those simplifications are appropriate.  There are a great number of small, discrete, questions that mean a great deal to me.  For instance:

Is the ocean ecosystem stable in its current population dynamics and genetic diversity?

(It's amusing that this question might lead to a contradiction.  People who feel we are at the end of "science" will tell me what we'll learn about those oceans in the coming decades.)

To say that we are just filling in the blanks or that the rest of knowledge is just going to become increasingly and prohibitively expensive is to reveal a surprising lack of understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of science and the problems therein.

As for what new discoveries have occurred within the last decade....hmmm "dark energy"? Problems with the cosmological constant?  Just to name a few "trivial conceptual problems."  (Quotation marks for effect.)  Does 1998 count as within the decade?

I am well aware of the history of science and its struggle to pull disparate facts together.  I also am a daily reader of science, and I am amazed at the number of discoveries that occur almost daily, many of which challenge our conceptual framework.   For example, the lowly vole has recently made it into the news with a genetic construct that possibly makes it an "evolutionary enigma."  (That is a quotation.)  (No expensive science here.)

Brian Appleyard, article in the Times a year ago:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1813695,00.html

Excerpt:

''Jonathan Huebner is an amiable, very polite and very correct physicist who works at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He took the job in 1985, when he was 26. An older scientist told him how lucky he was. In the course of his career, he could expect to see huge scientific and technological advances. But by 1990, Huebner had begun to suspect the old man was wrong. "The number of advances wasn't increasing exponentially, I hadn't seen as many as I had expected -- not in any particular area, just generally."
Puzzled, he undertook some research of his own. He began to study the rate of significant innovations as catalogued in a standard work entitled The History of Science and Technology. After some elaborate mathematics, he came to a conclusion that raised serious questions about our continued ability to sustain progress. What he found was that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation -- which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year -- is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024 it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, the period between the end of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.
The calculations are based on innovations per person, so if we could keep growing the human population we could, in theory, keep up the absolute rate of innovation. But in practice, to do that, we'd have to swamp the world with billions more people almost at once. That being neither possible nor desirable, it seems we'll just have to accept that progress, at least on the scientific and technological front, is slowing very rapidly indeed.
Huebner offers two possible explanations: economics and the size of the human brain. Either it's just not worth pursuing certain innovations since they won't pay off -- one reason why space exploration has all but ground to a halt -- or we already know most of what we can know, and so discovering new things is becoming increasingly difficult. We have, for example, known for over 20 years how cancer works and what needs to be done to prevent or cure it. But in most cases, we still have no idea how to do it, and there is no likelihood that we will in the foreseeable future.
Huebner's insight has caused some outrage. The influential scientist Ray Kurzweil has criticised his sample of innovations as "arbitrary"; K Eric Drexler, prophet of nanotechnology, has argued that we should be measuring capabilities, not innovations. Thus we may travel faster or access more information at greater speeds without significant innovations as such.
Huebner has so far successfully responded to all these criticisms. Moreover, he is supported by the work of Ben Jones, a management professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. Jones has found that we are currently in a quandary comparable to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Basically, two centuries of economic growth in the industrialised world has been driven by scientific and technological innovation. We don't get richer unaided or simply by working harder: we get richer because smart people invent steam engines, antibiotics and the internet. What Jones has discovered is that we have to work harder and harder to sustain growth through innovation. More and more money has to be poured into research and development and we have to deploy more people in these areas just to keep up. "The result is," says Jones, "that the average individual innovator is having a smaller and smaller impact."
Like Huebner, he has two theories about why this is happening. The first is the "low-hanging fruit" theory: early innovators plucked the easiest-to-reach ideas, so later ones have to struggle to crack the harder problems. Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating. "I've noticed that Nobel-prize winners are getting older," he says. "That's a sure sign it's taking longer to innovate." The other alternative is to specialise -- but that would mean innovators would simply be tweaking the latest edition of Windows rather than inventing the light bulb. The effect of their innovations would be marginal, a process of making what we already have work slightly better. This may make us think we're progressing, but it will be an illusion.
If Huebner and Jones are right, our problem goes way beyond Windows. For if innovation is the engine of economic progress -- and almost everybody agrees it is -- growth may be coming to an end. Since our entire financial order -- interest rates, pension funds, insurance, stock markets -- is predicated on growth, the social and economic consequences may be cataclysmic.
Is it really happening? Will progress grind to a halt? The long view of history gives conflicting evidence. Paul Ormerod, a London-based economist and author of the book Why Most Things Fail, is unsure. "I am in two minds about this. Biologists have abandoned the idea of progress -- we just are where we are. But humanity is so far in advance of anything that has gone before that it seems to be a qualitative leap."

Parkins, here, seems to me like one of those tired old crusty guys you sometimes encounter, who has decided to plant at least one foot solipsistically and firmly in the grave. Indeed, much of the article carries the same baggage, although at the end, Horgan - strangely - still sees a point to encouraging young people to take up science.

As to fusion specifically, these days, $20 billion, or $13 billion, spread over a period of decades, is chickenfeed, not remotely comparable to spending over the same time even on something as trivial as lipstick. Large populations produce large numbers, duh. A favorite rhetorical trick, of course, is to aggregate spending over decades if one wants to say it is too much, but state the daily amount - or even the daily amount per capita - if one wants to say it is too little. Last time I looked, the U.S. was spending under $1 million a day on fusion. Or 0.3 American cents per capita. Hahahaha. It's immeasurably small chickenfeed that way too.

And, remember, as with anything else labelled "nuclear", much of that is spent not on researchers and equipment, but on: paperwork, accountants, plush-bottomed bureaucrats, fearfully hypercautious "safety officers", writers of managerial "reports", legislators angling for lucre for their own localities, and a wide variety of other such social parasites.

We're not yet running out of science, even though we've already discovered electricity and need not discover it again. We're merely suffering the side effects of "democracy" - paralysis induced in part by constant shameless political fearmongering designed to fetch the votes of the Great Shiftless Quivering Terrified Moron Mass. Somehow we just know it's all over, so we act to ensure artificially that it shall be all over. And besides, it's nuclear, sound the quivering dissonant quartile chord.

Faith-based self-limitation, I guess.

When we've faithfully self-limited ourselves into a sufficiently cramped and awful corner, I suppose we'll just have to give up on democracy and appoint a proconsul to sort out our mess. Or at least, that's the way it has always been done, over the millennia.