looking at econonmic growth it's extremely hard to deny. The years ca. 1945-1975 constitute an exceptional period in innovation far surpassing anything today, both qualitatively as well as quantitavely. (new marginal innovations in tech or pharmaceuticals today tend to be about 10-50x more expensive than just a few decades ago).
Relevant reading: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War Robert J Gordon
In 2020 you need 10,000 scientists and $9bn to build a hadron collider, and 99.9% of people won't even understand if your result is important or not.
Are we less good at science now, given that we're spending far more resources for far less impact? Or rather, are we better, but the lowest hanging and juiciest fruit got picked first?
And yet those discoveries weren't made in the previous thousands of years during which people had been standing around in thunderstorms. The enlightenment represented a paradigm shift where a new innovation - the scientific method - was applied en masse for the first time and it led to revolutions in science, technology, and society. Whenever a paradigm shift happens, be it the practical steam engine or long range electricity transmission, you invariably have a lot of suddenly accessible low hanging fruit. The mid 20th century had a surprisingly large number of such paradigm shifting innovations such as solid state transistors, integrated circuits, jet engines, nuclear reactors, antibiotics, solar cells, the internet, lasers, credit cards, the list goes on. Entire new fields of science and sectors of industry popped up in a very short period of time.
We continue to innovate, but our innovations are mostly evolutionary and there have been comparatively few paradigm altering inventions in the past 30 years, especially when one considers how much larger the population of sufficiently educated and affluent individuals who could produce such innovations has become and how much easier it is for such innovations to be communicated. It is impressive how good we've gotten at picking higher fruit, but we should still be asking why we are struggling so hard to find low hanging fruit.
There’s plenty of room for innovation in green energy tech, housing materials, ag science, etc... We’re objectively spending more to get those than we used to need to. And that’s WITH google and scihub! Something is rotten.
The idea that the "big problems" can be solved by small teams pontificating is missing all but that last step.
My point (which I understand is controversial) is there's no requirement for billions of dollars and thousands of scientists to make the next big breakthrough. There's still low hanging fruit. Less than there used to be, but it's still there.
The LHC and big $$ funding is _one_ way to do it. So far its been unable to solve the biggest problems we have in physics (agreed that it's helped disprove some).
We're at a point now that is similar to what people were saying in 1900. Some people say "we've almost dusted this physics thing off and figured it all out". I'm fairly confident something is going to come along from some small corner of physics that will knock all our socks off the same way Quantum Mech and Relativity did... it may arrive this year or it may arrive in 120 years more to get there though.
The big problems in science can be solved by much smaller teams is my point. Sure it will take an army to completely work out the implications of the breakthrough. But the breakthrough "aha" can still come from an individual or small team.
In case anyone wants a quick link to the LHC dark matter program, check the ATLAS [1] and CMS [2] summaries.
TL;DR: The LHC has ruled out a good chunk of a few popular dark matter variants already. There are a lot more searches in the pipeline. They haven't found anything yet, but of course nature doesn't just drop particles in the first place you look.
There are also some crazier plans in the works [3] which use the existing beams to look in other places.
[1]: https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/CombinedSumma...
[2]: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/CMSPublic/SummaryPlotsE...
What’s rotten exactly? Take a look at this lovely graph [0] showing the cost of solar cells going from $76.67/watt in 1977, to $0.74/watt in 2013 (the price of installation is obviously more than the cell production costs, at about $2.5-$3.5/watt today).
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2014/09/04/solar-panel-cost-trends...
Which one fits your definition of important scientific question that we should answer?
What you're describing though is a small number of companies making significant technological leaps, not the quantity of innovation. People also argue that the invention of the internet, and the subsequent global proliferation high speed internet represents the same sort of revolutionary leap forward (one that we're going through right now).
One key difference is that inventions like the microprocessor or the steam engine are deeply fundamental. They're at the 'backend' of the chain. Internet based digital services are at the consumer end. Which has produced some growth, but could be argued to mostly fuel hedonistic consumption. (It's hard to figure out what deep growth watching hours of tiktok creates)
In his book Gordon points to the thought experiment of going to sleep in 1870 and waking up in 1970 in NY. You'd be in an entirely transformed world. Cars, buildings reaching into the sky everywhere, electrified subway stations, computers, drugs that save countless of millions of lives, modern agriculture and so forth. Go to sleep in 1970 and wake up in 2020 and what's changed, other than people staring at tiny screens?
It also never crossed the Iron Curtain into Warsaw Pact countries.
In reality (aside from tremendous change of political landscape) the 80s and the 00s weren't particularly different to live in.
"tech startups" seems to be synonymous with what the author call the "successors of corporate labs", and that seems to be why VC:s seems to be OK with pouring moneys for a semi-long term payback.
People/Companies that play this expectation (such as WeWork and Theranos) get the moral shaming from mostly tech people, while the rest seems to not get the point of the hate. (Not much indifferent from why some people do/didn't see the point of a corporate lab more than a cost sink)
Come to think of it, Company/CEO:s that overly focus on the "tech" image might be a warning sign that they might be just snake oil (such as Theranos CEO mimicing Jobs)
Even if you were only concerned with technological innovation, referencing well funded non-technical companies doesn’t negate the existence of any of the well funded technology-focused companies.
Also, Theranos is a perfect example of private equity funding technological research. The fact that it was a scam doesn’t take away from the interest it’s investors had in new technology.
A lot of the technology I use at work is funded innovation. Linux (largely Intel), React (facebook), Rust (Mozilla - kinda), Golang (Google), Objective-C, Kotlin, Typescript... There's also a huge number of AI and some very well-funded self-driving-car startups. For hardware, it's unlikely that a startup is going to disrupt companies like Intel, AMD, nVidia, Samsung... but that's only because they're already innovating at such an impressive pace. But even those companies don't come up with all their own innovations. For instance, the technology in the new displays Samsung recently announced comes from a company called Nanosys, which has been funding reliant since 2001. Theranos also comes to mind, which while it was a scam, it was a very well funded one.
Aside from the issue you mentioned, the article seems to be making the claim that we have less innovation today. Which just seems like a ridiculous claim to me.
It also mentions “pervasive short-termism” as an obstacle. It might be in large public companies, but it’s certainly not in the private equity markets. Innovative companies have access to huge amounts of capital, and can stay unprofitable for such a long period of time that many people think we’re in a bubble. Multi-billion dollar valuation and “may never be profitable” is perfectly ordinary these days, and certainly doesn’t lend any credibility to the authors argument.