“The Big Crunch”, 1994 (; backlinks; similar):
[On the end to the post-WWII Vannevar Bushian exponential growth of academia and consequences thereof: growth can’t go on forever, and it didn’t.]
According to modern cosmology, the universe began with a big bang about 10 billion years ago, and it has been expanding ever since. If the density of mass in the universe is great enough, its gravitational force will cause that expansion to slow down and reverse, causing the universe to fall back in on itself. Then the universe will end in a cataclysmic event known as ‘the Big Crunch’. I would like to present to you a vaguely analogous theory of the history of science. The upper curve on Figure 1 was first made by historian Derek da Solla Price, sometime in the 1950s. It is a semilog plot of the cumulative number of scientific journals founded worldwide as a function of time…the growth of the profession of science, the scientific enterprise, is bound to reach certain limits. I contend that these limits have now been reached.
…But after about 1970 and the Big Crunch, the gleaming gems produced at the end of the vast mining-and-sorting operation produced less often from American ore. Research professors and their universities, using ore imported from across the oceans, kept the machinery humming.
…Let me finish by summarizing what I’ve been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today’s scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950–20197054ya. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever.
View HTML: