The scientific method

Ok, so here is a new hypothesis – you heard it hear first.

The simplest and cheapest observations or measurements that humans can make are with our born senses – ears, eyes, nose, taste and touch.

Over history, as we attempted to observe things on a smaller and larger scale, typically those measurements have become more expensive. That is we had to first do a lot of R&D and then engineer-up some equipment that could make the measurements.

As example on the small scale would be the microscope which is an expensive little device when it was first made, or a particle accelerator. On the large scale think of a Mars satellite mission.

Science up until the late 20th century was very much focused on explaining observations and less about creating new things. New things occasionally were invented but this wasn’t the primary focus of academic science – they tended to happen by ‘serendipity’.

Initially the observations of interest were of nature, but after a while this transitioned to observation of complex man-made systems.

As the building blocks of scientific knowledge were laid down – starting from the Newtonian human scale and then working into the very small (in distance, say mm, microns, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles etc) to the very large (meters to the edge of the universe) – we were building up layers upon layers of knowledge and understanding.

By the end of the twentieth century many scientists had switched from ‘explaining observations’ to creating ‘new complex systems’ (petit-engineering or nanotech) and this is because interesting new observations were getting too complex and expensive. Unfortunately most of the science at the more readily understood (and cheaper) scales (in distance, time, whatever) had been well documented and modelled so it wasn’t of much interest.

And this is where my hypothesis comes in – I believe there is an exponentially increasing cost (in time, resources, effort, dollars, whatever) in making scientific observations as the scale departs from the everyday (to both the very small and the very large). So for most scientists it was simply a matter of diminishing returns if they followed the old scientific method. Which is why they switched to Nanotech.

There are a handful of scientists still working away at scales very far removed from the everyday. For example some astrophysicists and particle physicists – and these guys struggle to get the massive funds they need to create the observations they need to progress their modelling. Most people realise they have one life and look at the odds of making a useful contribution in these areas and go elsewhere.

I have another hypothesis and that is that the probability of being able to create useful everyday spin-off technologies from new modelling or observations also decreases exponentially as the scale departs from the everyday (to both the very small and to the very large).

So its a double-whammy – the costs go up exponentially and the probability of useful spin-off technologies go down exponentially as the as the scale departs from the everyday (to both the very small and the very large). No wonder the few remaining pure academic old-school scientific method-type scientists are having such a hard time of it. I expect them to disappear entirely over the next 20 years or so.