Right now, science has an emphasis on causal discovery. Showing that X is a mechanism by which Y happens. That includes finding the different X's for a Y and finding evidence for the relationship between a given X and Y. Once you know how a thing works, that doesn't necessarily make it easy to work with it. For example in quantum mechanics, a common phrase is "shut up and calculate" because the mental models are all messy.
But as we all know (especially those of us who have refactored many systems), every once in a while you find a new way of looking at a thing that makes it all much simpler. A geometric way to look at an algebraic thing, or vice versa. Or a unifying structure to combine disparate pieces. Or just a "wow that was dumb" undoing of unnecessary complexity. It makes further progress easier.
I could imagine that, as the boundaries of science get more complex, there will be more scientists working on making the rest of it less complex. Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and live longer. The calculations involved with many areas of modern science have already outpaced what we can do by hand, but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion numbers without much effort and spend my time elsewhere.
And in med school, apparently they say "half of what we teach you will be false, but we don't know which half." As science progresses, you don't just add, you prune too.
Ever since I saw this animation [1] of the difference between a heliocentric vs geocentric view of the planets, I always see complexity in a new light. The geocentric movements are all technically correct (thats how they move in relation to the earth) but once the true state is discovered it becomes so much more simple.
> Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and live longer. The calculations involved with many areas of modern science have already outpaced what we can do by hand, but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion numbers without much effort and spend my time elsewhere.
With software being as slow as it is despite massive speedups, and even despite despite massive speedups, we really are still not good enough at using our computers to their fullest capacity which still means getting insights into complexity before crunching the numbers.
Negate the operating environments that calculations are made in and the operating environments are not an issue, alright.
There definitely is a lot of bloat in the software world, but even large bioninformatics organizations have their own data-pipeline management teams to keep these issues in spec.
Nicely put. In fact a lot of the field of quantum foundations (and interpretations) could be seen as an attempt to work towards this sort of perspective/paradigm shift.
But as we all know (especially those of us who have refactored many systems), every once in a while you find a new way of looking at a thing that makes it all much simpler. A geometric way to look at an algebraic thing, or vice versa. Or a unifying structure to combine disparate pieces. Or just a "wow that was dumb" undoing of unnecessary complexity. It makes further progress easier.
I could imagine that, as the boundaries of science get more complex, there will be more scientists working on making the rest of it less complex. Meanwhile, maybe we get smarter and live longer. The calculations involved with many areas of modern science have already outpaced what we can do by hand, but we invented computers, so I can take the mean of a zillion numbers without much effort and spend my time elsewhere.
And in med school, apparently they say "half of what we teach you will be false, but we don't know which half." As science progresses, you don't just add, you prune too.