
Okay, Maybe Proofs Aren't Dying After All - lelf
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/okay-maybe-proofs-arent-dying-after-all/
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lordnacho
Seems like one of those Lindy effect things. The longer proofs have been part
of math, the longer you should expect them to stay there. This is why you can
dismiss a new fashion as a fad, but once it's been around for a while you
should acknowledge its staying power.

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xvilka
Science, including mathematics always produce Black Swans. While it's possible
to speculate about little incremental progress in known unknown, it's totally
impossible to predict anything about unknown unknown. New branches of
mathematics, maybe even whole new sciences, just like computer science came
into existence only after a computer was invented.

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xamuel
Imagine if, back when we thought the sun revolves around the earth, some great
king wanted to better understand astronomy. So he established a National
Science Foundation to pump out hundreds of trillions of dollars to scientists
to study astronomy and better understand it. What would be the result? The
result would be ever more sophisticated treatises on geocentrism, with ever
more complicated gymnastics to explain observations based on flawed models. It
would actually make it harder to challenge geocentrism, because there would be
so much more financial momentum behind geocentrism.

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comicjk
This is historically doubtful. The most famous anti-heliocentric researcher,
Galileo, was a professor at the University of Padua. This university relied on
the Church at least as much as a modern US university relies on the NSF.
Furthermore the Church had vastly more power over publication than any
institution in any free country today. Yet, the truth still shone through. If
Renaissance Italian research funding had been greater, we would have gotten
more empty treatises on heliocentrism, but also more chances at a Galileo.

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Quipunotch104
John Horgan loves making these wild assertions even though he is not a trained
scientist or mathematician. He once even published a book called the End of
Science. In that book, Horgan said that scientists were no longer going to
come up with revolutionary scientific theories like relativity and the theory
of evolution. Safe to say, this guy has a reputation of writing edgy and
provocative things with very little basis in reality.

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brianlweiner
John was a professor of mine, so I'll defend him a bit here :). To be clear,
he's certainly a contrarian, and has a fairly pessimistic take on modern
scientific progress.

I pushed back in class quite a bit about his 'End of Science' claims, and we
disagreed frequently - but his actual claims are usually not as strong as
they're made out to be. He simply doesn't see the same sort of practical gains
being made from scientific research that we were making in the 19th and early
20th century.

If we look at the research being produced by obviously impressive scientific
endeavors like LHC - I think you can see his point. We're obviously gaining
knowledge, and negative results are still valuable, but we're investing more
and more to make incremental progress in many fields and the actual research
is becoming less and less accessible to the average person.

Anyway, it's not my job to defend John's work (he's more than capable of
responding to critics) but I always found him to be interesting, patient and
encouraging to his students. His class was one of my favorites and even if I
disagree with his claims overall I don't think they deserve to be dismissed so
readily.

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wongarsu
I think everyone can agree that late 19th century up to the first half of the
20th century was an unusual time with many scientific breakthroughs. Science
is moving much slower now, but it's still much faster than in the time before
that.

