Experiencing Scientific Revolutions
Table of Contents
Notes from an Article: Experiencing scientific revolutions: the 1660s and the 2020s - Lessons from Robert Boyle's scientific desiderata
Discoveries in 2023:
- OpenAI's ChatGPT
- Tiny robot that can clean blood vessels
- Progress on mRNA vaccines for cancer
- Promising results for Alzheimer's drug
- Nuclear fusion ignition with net energy gain (Reuters)
The widely publicized paper (in Nature) argues that there has been steady drop in 'disruptive' science. But the paper doesn't cite any historians of science.
This article talks about two things to learn from History of Science:
- People living through scientific revolutions are usually unaware of them
- An apparent slowdown in the rate of scientific innovation doesn't always mean a slowdown in the impacts of science.
1. Scientific revolutions are confusing
People living through scientific revolutions are usually unaware of them — and, if they are, they don't think about them in the same way that later generations do.
Robert Boyle (in 17th century) was not hoping for the invention of steam engines, or telegraphs, or power looms, or many of the other famous breakthroughs of the age of industrialization that followed him. He was hoping for things like "the cure of wounds at a distance" and drugs that "exalt imagination." Throughout his career, Robert Boyle described himself as a natural philosopher or a naturalist; his frenemy Isaac Newton was an alchemist through and through.
When we quantify scientific innovation, then, it's worth remembering that the ways we think about the science of the 2020s might seem as epistemologically foreign to people in the future as the self-conceptions of Boyle and Newton seem to people of today.
2. The Midgley Effect
An apparent slowdown in the rate of scientific innovation doesn't always mean a slowdown in the impacts of science. The researchers who demonstrated the harms of CFCs had a huge impact but they weren't counted as same in history of scientific progress.
Thomas Midgley Jr. was an American engineer who, in the 1920s, developed both leaded gasoline and CFCs. As the environmental historian J. R. McNeill memorably argued, he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."
But before Midgley was blamed for the 1970s crime wave or the hole in the ozone layer, he was a celebrated inventor It took decades to understand that Midgley's work was scientifically innovative, but socially harmful. Do researchers of the 1970s, 80s and 90s who demonstrated those harms "count" in the history of scientific progress in the same way that Midgley's innovations did?
It is worth remembering that it often takes decades before the lasting social value of a technical innovation is understood — and decades more before we understand its downsides.
