Where have all the scientific geniuses gone?
Where have all the scientific geniuses gone?
Do you sometimes think that we’ll never see a new Einstein or Newton? You might be right:
Today, according to Simonton, there just isn’t room to create new disciplines or overthrow the old ones. “It is difficult to imagine that scientists have overlooked some phenomenon worthy of its own discipline,” he writes. Furthermore, most scientific fields aren’t in the type of crisis that would enable paradigm shifts, according to Thomas Kuhn’s classic view of scientific revolutions. Simonton argues that instead of finding big new ideas, scientists currently work on the details in increasingly specialized and precise ways.
And to some extent, this argument is demonstrably correct. Science is becoming more and more specialized. The largest scientific fields are currently being split into smaller sub-disciplines: microbiology, astrophysics, neuroscience, and paleogeography, to name a few. Furthermore, researchers have more tools and the knowledge to hone in on increasingly precise issues and questions than they did a century—or even a decade—ago.