To give my thoughts about the term 'Big Discoveries': I think it's mainly from the influence of the Enlightenment to focus on discovering absolute, simple laws of nature, and analytically using these laws to obtain a greater understanding of the world. But recently we are now discovering that most of the phenomenon we empirically observe (whether it be chemistry, biology, or society) can't be deduced straightforwardly from those laws, and conversely there is a limit to how we can deduce absolute laws from empirical data, due to the complex nature of large dynamic systems (interplay between molecules, interplay between cells, interplay between humans). The grand problem of Complexity still haunts us to this day.

I think that in the near future there will be a mode shift about how we think about science and technology in general. Simulation will start to replace analytic reasoning (since logical deduction inside our heads has reached its limits of analyzing complex systems), and science will become more and more indistinguishable from engineering (The question of 'what is possible?' will begin to replace 'why is this possible?'). I'm both terrified and excited about this new era.

I wrote a blog post about the same idea just last week, hope it’s ok to share here: https://choxi.github.io/three-body-problems

The Grand Problem of Complexity is a good name for it.

I'd love to read a book about this, do you have any suggestions?

It's not from a single book, I've personally come to the conclusion after reading about various topics on both science and philosophy, as well as thinking about some current trends in science and engineering. I can't really give you a simple answer, I'm still studying and trying to figure this out.

But to give you a bunch of unorganized links if you want to follow a similar line of thought:

- Cybernetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics)

- Systems theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory)

- Seeing how theoretical physics has been left behind in progress for many decades in favor of fields like chemistry, biology, and earth sciences - which all seem to use those discovered laws of physics, and is increasingly trying to arrive at conclusions through computer simulation of those physical laws.

- Thinking about the relationship between computer graphics (which brings the virtual to the real) and computer vision (which brings the real to the virtual) - and its interplay between the two.

- Continental philosophy (I'm currently reading Batallie's The Accursed Share and it's giving lots of good insights about 'societal' systems and the general economy. Deleuze & Guattari also talks a lot about cybernetics, although their books are notoriously hard to decipher and I've only read second-hand explanations of it. And a few writings from Nick Land (preferably something before his breakdown) seems quite illuminating. Marx also seems to have some surprising proto-insights about the cybernetics of capitalism - it's an area of research I might delve into it later.)

I think science is in a crisis today for the same reason society is: the underlying ethics is a scientific realism have yet to be established. That's to say science, or the advancement of organized knowledge and the corresponding cultural realities are still oriented around anthropomorphic biases that were formed during the advent of global culture and embodied by the mystery religions. This made sense when the planet was a conquest, but not so much as a management strategy. Instead the ethics of science and culture need to be organized around ecological ethics: the reality of planetary stewardship is the challenge of the Anthropocene. This is a problem for scientific culture, because it's easy to build complexity on existing paradigms, it's harder to reorganize ones fundamental belief system. Example is being able to describe the surface of a black hole while people starve in the street. The problem of modern scientific progress is a problem of ethical reorganization, and once that is done (if it succeeds) then again we will be able to build systems of thought that appear new and foundational like the classical ones.

That is a really excellent and concise analysis of the situation.

"This made sense when the planet was a conquest, but not so much as a management strategy" is such a powerful phrase! Thank you

This is all exactly correct. What too often is left out of these discussions is the labor pool and incentives. Too many cooks in the kitchen, because there are incentives to keep adding more cooks, as though increasing the researcher labor supply were a goal in itself, rather what it truly is, an obstacle to progress. Eternal September comes to academia too, a side effect of scale.

Curiously I think Jimmy Wales contribution was not that store of knowledge, but the community which keeps it alive. He has curated a sphere of unusual individuals working for free.

Otherwise somebody has likely already cloned or mirrored Wikipedia.