Science Is Running Out Of Things To Discover?
[H]aven’t we learned anything from the history of science? The last time someone thought that we knew all there was to know about an area of physics, and all that we could do was simply to make incremental understanding of the area, it was pre-1985 before Mother Nature smacked us right in the face with the discovery of high-Tc superconductors.
I have some serious doubts about the original article as well. When I say the claim the the time was getting longer for nobel awards I thought it was a typo, because in my atomic physics corner of the world, that trend does not seem to be in place at all. AMO physics has reflected a short gap between discovery and Nobel. And looking at that trend makes me doubt the physics graph presented in that paper.
The 1989 Nobel went, in part, to Norman Ramsey for his separated oscillatory fields method used in atomic clocks, developed in 1949. I don’t see a 40-year data point anywhere on the graph.
The 1997 Nobel was awarded for contributions to laser cooling and trapping, with the experimental start in the early/mid-1980’s. I don’t see any ~15-year data point for 1997.
The first Bose-Einstein condensate was observed in 1995. The Nobel was awarded for that in 2001 – a scant six years. No such data point exists.
The optical frequency comb was demonstrated in 1999, and the Nobel was awarded (again) six years later. That data point is missing as well.
I don’t know what’s going on, but this doesn’t smell right.
The legend says it’s a 5-year moving average.
OK, I missed that. Still, the AMO prizes show there are plenty of new discoveries.
There’s also an issue with how you count Glauber, whose share of the 2005 prize might move the effective date much earlier. The papers the Nobel folks cite in their write-up of the 2005 prize go back to the mid-1960’s.
If you take the average of the dates of publication for the five-year span starting in 2001 and ending in 2005 you get something around 30 years, which is in the ballpark of the points on the graph in that article.
It might be interesting to look at the graph without the average, though, because I feel a little like the scatter is getting bigger. They seem to be unofficially spreading the prizes around among subfields, which means you get a mix of recent prizes for very active fields (AMO, condensed matter, observational cosmology) and long-delayed prizes for fields that are more static (particle physics).
I agree. The fact that there are several “quick-hitting” Nobels runs contrary to the thesis and that’s masked by averaging. Furthermore, a long delay between the theory and the confirmation probably means the technology needed to advance before the prediction could be confirmed, but advancement in experiment is still advancement! It’s just being discounted as less important.