But it does for the simple reason, that you need to read more and more papers just to know whether or not someone didn't already do your research, or if there isn't already a growing body of evidence against the theory you're trying to develop.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kj/no_one_knows_what_science_doesnt_...

Scientific progress is about to hit a self-complexity boundary due to the amount of knowledge we amassed - we have a huge overhead on adding any single new piece to a puzzle. Our brains are not good enough for handling it anymore, we need computers to help.

EDIT

And also because of that, I believe there's a huge amount of undiscovered facts lurking in all the discoveries we already had described, that no one noticed before because it requires correlating different papers from different disciplines (think about the more messy fields, like biology/medicine). Finding a way for computers to effectively do that work for us will likely result in some amazing progress.

If so one should force the release of copyright papers from the publishers at gunpoint tomorrow. And make google dedicate half it's employees to indexing it

I suspect though that there are so few scientists working on most areas that the research is old or outdated across the majority of fields.

And it rather indicates a lack of fundamental tools - for example studying insect species - it's well know that there are millions of species to every insectologist(?) - yet Linnaeus classification is three centuries old - one could imagine a production line of genome mapping - put insec into machine out comes its genome - oh look that is not the species we were thinking of

The tools (mechanical) and the tools (mental) need to integrate large branches if science are what is needed - not a fear over the vast number of facts we have acquired