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The Heat Death of Science

January 28, 2008

Several years ago, I was fairly up-to-date on dyslexia research. A couple colleagues and I were writing a comprehensive review of the literature. Several drafts of the pape were written, but for various reasons that project got put aside and was never finished.

I'm currently preparing to overhaul that paper and update it based on recent research. To put this in perspective, 147 papers on dyslexia were published in 2007 alone (according to PsychInfo*).

Like the physical universe, the universe of knowledge has been expanding at an accelerated rate. It's hard to be current in several fields. By the time you are current in psychology, sociology has moved on. With time, it seems increasingly difficult to stay on top of multiple subfields (e.g., autism and dyslexia).

I wonder how long it will be before it is impossible to stay on top of even a single, narrow topic. This postulated moment would be the equivalent of heat death for science. Or not. Perhaps science will end in a big crunch instead.

Or will we find ways of dealing with massive amounts of information. While our technologies in this arena have improved, I take it as self-evidence that they have not improved as fast as information has increased.

Thoughts?

*If anybody for some reason wants to check for themselves, I searched for papers with the word "dyslexia" in the abstract. If you search for "dyslexia" in any field, you get 177.