What happened to big science?

Big science seems like it's in a real funk. The world wars generated loads of big science, including such magnificent (and terrible) spectacles as the splitting of the atom. A brand new type of weapon was born and a phenomenon the world had never seen was demonstrated in a spectacular way. Earlier in the century, people flew through the air in powered craft for the first time, and in the same century, they left the earth altogether and landed on another world. Those are big, noticeable things. Also in the 20th century, relativity, quantum physics, the big bang, and genetics were described, the very foundations of our modern understanding of life and the universe.

So what have we done lately? Computer advances have been remarkable, but so what? They're just technology, not science. Tools for our use like the combustion engine. If true AI had been devloped by now, along with a theory of mind, that would be something to add to the list, but it hasn't. And we don't seem to be making much headway, despite the precipitous increase in computational power. The big idea is not there. The Internet is amazing, but it's not science either, it's an application of technology and a sociological phenonmenon. It's still probably the most life-changing thing to come along in the second half of the 20th century. We haven't done anything else remarkable in space since landing on the moon 36 years ago. There have been refinements but no revolutions in physics, certainly nothing even close to the twin explosions of the early 20th century. Chemistry has been dead for a century.

Geology and biology are where all the action are, especially biology. Cloning/genetic engineering, disease theory, and aging are all active areas of research. But even these exciting developments pale in comparison to Darwin's theory of natural selection, Mendel's working out of the laws of inheritance, and Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA. Those were all fundamental discoveries that defined the field, and they all occured within a 100 year span, which ended, as most all big science did, in the middle of the 20th century. Today's biotechnology is just that, technology. It's largely derivative and only contributes to greater understanding of specialized areas, rather than overturning the entire field. It remains to be seen of course where these studies will lead us.

Maybe all the big science has been done. Maybe it's all just filling in the details now. I don't really believe this though; I tend to feel that somehow we've still got most things wrong. Every era is convinced it has done away with the folly of the past and secured a basic understanding of truth, and so every era has been wrong. I see no reason why the trend won't continue. For example, I don't believe the conventional explanation for the rise of life from nonlife is adequate, nor that our definitions of such things really make sense. I believe systems are fluid and cannot be divided into discrete areas of study and reduced to fundamentals without losing much of the essence of the larger structure. I believe the sciences will converge and that therefore laws of synnergy and emergence will need to be discovered. These call for statistical breakthroughs and more sophisticated mathematics in general. Philosophy is ripe for a shakeup - perhaps as the mind-from-matter issue becomes more empirical. Psychology is just now making the transition to a hard science.

Surely some of these fields, as well as others, will provide fertile grounds for more big science and more breakthroughs that will make the public sit up and take notice. But it may be that the days of remarkable individual achievement, of Newton and Darwin and Einstein, are largely over, and that teams of scientists and huge corporations will author the advances of the future. My generation may be one of the first to miss out on the days of maverick science, and that is a shame. It's a pity I couldn't have lived a bit earlier.