Art is a line around your thoughts.
—Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)
✏️ Ideas
When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The world has not changed much. Our ways of living has evolved, but humans have fundamentally stayed the same. The same motivating forces that fueled the joys and crises of the past are ever present today.
I wonder how different the world will be 200 years from now. Or even 50 years from now. The memories of my childhood, with landline phones and boxy, desktop computers, is a long-gone remnant of the past. Today, my phone has more computing power than everything in my childhood combined. The world is increasingly technological. I reckon there was a time no calculators were allowed in math classes. I wouldn’t be surprised to find VR headsets today.
The present is always in a tug of war between the past and future. The past beckons us to return to our old ways of thinking and doing in the world. Tradition and custom prevail in that world, and innovation happens in the vacuum of the sure and certain. Artists, innovators and creators are in a constant battle to drag us into the future and fight against the old ideas. If we are to do anything different, anything innovative that will improve upon the status quo, keep afresh our spirits against the old.
Fiat lux.
💡 Food for Thought
🧬 Paper of the Week — Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
Citation: Park, M., Leahey, E. & Funk, R.J. Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature 613, 138–144 (2023).
Theories of scientific and technological change view discovery and invention as endogenous processes1,2, wherein previous accumulated knowledge enables future progress by allowing researchers to, in Newton’s words, ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’3,4,5,6,7. Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances8,9. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields10,11. Here, we analyse these claims at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric—the CD index12—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics1,13,14,15,16,17. Subsequently, we link this decline in disruptiveness to a narrowing in the use of previous knowledge, allowing us to reconcile the patterns we observe with the ‘shoulders of giants’ view. We find that the observed declines are unlikely to be driven by changes in the quality of published science, citation practices or field-specific factors. Overall, our results suggest that slowing rates of disruption may reflect a fundamental shift in the nature of science and technology.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen — not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
—CS Lewis (1898-1963)
Until next time!
AT