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The Heat Death of Science

January 28, 2008

coglanglab's picture

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.

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Comments

Submitted by Joe

January 31, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 22 weeks ago
Comment id: 27269

I see the problem as not from the volume of information available but from the force of superstition which so strongly attracts the mind. My fear is that given the opportunity, superstition will replace knowledge.

I believe this theme has been covered in science fiction like Star Trek. Recall the epidsode about the Constitution of the United States.

It isn't actually difficult

January 29, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 22 weeks ago
Comment id: 27226

It isn't actually difficult to stay reasonably abreast of various subjects. It IS difficult to stay so well informed as to remain useful, but that's something else. Becoming specialized is a necessity for the average scientist, but remaining uninformed about other advances, how they relate to your field and how your own research can potentially relate to them is most likely just laziness. Personally I can't imagine Not staying informed. The whole reason I got into academics was because I liked learning about the world, not because I liked sacrificing my sanity working on the same group of problems my whole life.

But to each their own, or whatnot.

Kurzweil & Anonymous

January 29, 2008 by coglanglab, 1 year 22 weeks ago
Comment id: 27222

I've heard of Kurzweil, but haven't read the books. I can't say if I know who you are, since you're signed in as "anonymous."

There's no doubt that technology is getting better. The question is whether technology is keeping up with the increase in information. If you look over the last two centuries, I think it's pretty clear that it has not. Whether it will do so in the future...I have no doubt you have ideas, but can you offer any evidence for them? It would be great if you can.

Please try my web-based experiments

If you pay any mind to Ray

January 28, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 22 weeks ago
Comment id: 27214

If you pay any mind to Ray Kurzweil (and myself), who has contemplated this at length, augmentation of our inherently limited biological vehicles (bodies) will allow for us to keep up. Now, imagining a hard drive wired into your brain may be too many steps for most people to accept at this point, but with a little abstraction you can see that we have already augmented our minds with a hard drive wired into our computers! Indeed you can see in your very post the profound effect computers and the internet has had on the accessibility of information; just a decade ago how long would it have taken you to figure out that 147 papers had been written?

Re: The Heat Death of Science

January 28, 2008 by kjellstrom, 1 year 22 weeks ago
Comment id: 27202

In my view, you describe the evolution of science with an increasing entropy in knowledge.

Likewise, the evolution of DNA resulted in a huge increase in the entropy, "average information", of DNA, represented by millions of different species and biljons of different individuals in certain species. But to day certain species go extinct. And I am not certain that new species arrive at the same speed.

Unfortunately, I have not seen very many textbooks in biology about average information in DNA.

Likewise, I think that knowledge may be overruled by new knowledge and simplified by Occam's razor. So I am not so pessimistic.

Gkm



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