• Question: Is there a law like Moore's law on computers, that predicts the progress of all the sciences?

    Asked by bluebingman to Chris, Dave, David, Jack on 26 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Jack Miller

      Jack Miller answered on 26 Jun 2013:


      Hi Bluebingman,

      Not that I’m aware of! Moore’s law isn’t really a lot, but an observation — and as we approach the point where we’re making computer chips as small as they can possibly be, it’s starting to break down. There’s no real fundamental reason why our progress (with either science or computing) should follow a particular distribution — if the world decided to have another massive world war, I’d suspect that the rate of increase of knowledge in some areas rapidly increased, and rapidly decreased in others. We are all human, after all!

      — Jack

    • Photo: David Freeborn

      David Freeborn answered on 27 Jun 2013:


      Hi bluebingman,

      Moore’s law comes in many forms, and some can vaguely apply to general science. I think the point is, humans are good at making life easier for future humans, so by almost any measure, the rate of progress will be proportional to some function of the progress already made. So any form of “progress” will have a type of exponential function.

      One example is total human information, stored in books, CDs, computer harddrives etc over time. That has been increasing in the same way as Moore’s law.

      Another is human GDP- gross domestic produce, per year. This has been growing exponentially for centuries. It gives some measure of human progress.

      In my area of physics, the highest energies we could reach in particle accelerators also followed an exponential curve to remarkably good accuracy during the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, funding for particle physics was cut and the curve has flattened off.

      The total number of scientific research papers published every year also follows an exponential curve. That gives some measure of progress- but not a good one, as more relevant is how much content is in each paper!

      It would be interesting to see if someone could come up with a more agreed measure of “scientific progress”. I think any attempt to do so would be very controversial, to say the least, because different fields would want to argue about their relative importance. Sadly, there’s no easy way to judge this.

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