Depletion of the low-hanging fruit in science
There's this overreaching idea that science is harder every year because the easy work has already been done. Is it possible to have another Newton anytime soon?
Why scientific progress seems to be slower may be due just to perception. It may be that incentives work against truly innovative work [@bhattacharya2020Stagnation and Scientific Incentives], or it may be that Science after WWII has stagnated.
The idea of the low-hanging fruit has been looming around always. I seem to remember a story in which Planck's father tried to steer him out of Physics, "because everything was already invented."
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Aquiles Carattino
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