Peak Science?

The rate of discovery of “asteroids, mammalian species and chemical elements” might be declining, but if you look at extrasolar planets or sequenced genomes or types of metamaterials, it would be a different story.

The low-hanging facts are gone in certain fields, but others are still wide open. There are still areas of science where the accumulation of facts hasn't even really started yet – e.g. xenobiology. And there are others where it seems like the balance of evidence changes every few years, like cosmology. What is dark matter? What is dark energy? Do they even exist or do they reflect that our current theories are flawed?

The cost per fact discovered may well be getting higher due to the increasing sophistication of tools required, but I'm not sure that means we are actually at “peak fact” yet.

Nicolas Rescher has pretty much nailed that discussion in the eighties.
(See Scientific Progress: A Philosophical Essay on the Economics of Research in Natural Science.)

QED! Instead of discovering something the author has just reiterated what others have already found to be true. Ironic isn't it?

This kind of thinking has come around before. In 1894, the Nobel prize winning physicist Albert Michelson said that, “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” A mere 9 years before Albert Einstein's work opened the door to the world of quantum physics.
Science is often driven by engineering. The ability to study a subject is sometimes limited by the cost of the equipment required. While fewer large mammals have been discovered recently our knowledge of the genetics of those mammals has greatly increased. As the cost of sequencing large stretches of DNA continues to drop more discoveries which utilize this knowledge will occur.
Rather than science getting harder I would argue that scientific discovery keeps pace with us. Many early experiments required significant resources and effort, such as the one performed by our friend Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887 which involved several mirrors on top of a block of large marble floating in mercury. Similarly, the sequencing of the human genome which required 13 years and millions of dollars could now be completed in a fraction of the time but rather than perform this feat again we have moved on to new vistas. Like the red queen in “Through the Looking Glass” we must keep running to stay in the same place.

The idea that collaborative work is rising in the academia because the number of authors on papers is growing is somewhat misleading.

Publishing became a score for students and professors when applying for scholarships and grants from foundations. Having a known professor endorsing your paper increases its chance of success. It's a good deal for both.

Although blind peer review should filter for bad papers, the subject is enough to know where the paper comes from and who is behind it.

Papers have also adopted vagueness as a form of protecting Intelectual Property. In my field of research, Computer Sciences, I have stumbled more and more on papers that present algorithms that do not work. Some papers show the same idea with only small differences, only enough to be considered as separated works.

Congresses and journals are charging higher and higher fees for publication and acceptance. Inovative ideas from students from developing countries are being filtered by this measure.

Science has not reached a peak. Science became a business.

Arbesman's work demonstrates a neat eclecticism in his research!

seems like the argument is more in line with the idea of a profit margin than that of scientific discovery. Since when was science about quantity over quality?

Let us not forget that the longer discovery goes on in a given field, the more there is for people to learn before they get to the leading edge. That learning takes more time, simply because there's a limit to how fast any one person can learn (or at least can advance through the academic system). Perhaps collaboration is a way of coping with this, as the combined knowledge of team members could make it possible for a team to reach the leading edge without any one member needing the entire background knowledge needed to do so on their on.

Low hanging fruit is a relative term. As more developments are made, what once seemed impossible is now feasible. There is stuff like P vs NP that's been there for a while, but there are a host of other problems that are still being discovered. The multiple authors is probably due more to the interconnected world in which we now live, where you can go online and do a quick search and find lots of problems similar to what you're doing, which leads to more publications.

And yet the discovery of extrasolar planets is not as fundamental as the discovery of planets as such. Also the discovery of 5, 10, 100 extrasolar planets or the sequencing of 5, 10, 100 genomes these days add increasingly smaller numbers of fundamental insights. The discovery of chemical elements is different in this sense as each one may be consiodered to have fundamentally different properties.

I would even argue that the fundamental principles of biology (DNA, genetic code, tranlsation into proteins that act as enzymes, heredity and evolution) have been left almost unaltered by the advent of genome sequecing. It is hard to see how biology (maybe this is different for physics) would go to any fundamental revolution from this time on. (maybe xenobiology but this might never be a part of the human scientific enterprise)

Yes there are always new fields opening but their relative output in terms of fundamental insights is decreasing overall. So I disagree with Ben.

Well…as a scientist myself (I am an astronomer who studies extrasolar planets), I respectfully disagree.

Take a nascent field like astrobiology, for instance. The discovery of of even the simplest microbe that originated on another planet could blow the field of biology wide open. If that's not a game changing discovery waiting to happen, I don't know what is. (If you don't believe astrobiology is “real science,” the NASA Astrobiology Institute would surely beg to differ :). No one within the field calls it “xenobiology,” by the way, but that's neither here nor there.

Genome sequencing has allowed us to map out the tree of life in exquisite detail. Genome sequencing has given us tantalizing hints that life on Earth originated in hydrothermal environments. This is the origin of life! That's amazing stuff! Genome sequencing has confirmed the existence of a third kingdom of life, archaea, which though superficially similar to bacteria, have genes as different from any bacterium as we do. There are all tremendous discoveries.

And then there's dark matter and, most mysteriously, dark energy, which cropped up unexpectedly and remain two of the biggest enigmas in cosmology. Dark energy in particular stands defiantly against all of our previous thinking about how the universe “should” be, and no one has yet come up with an inkling of an explanation for it. Once a satisfying explanation is found, I would be shocked if it didn't have profound reverberations across physics.

Once CERN comes on line (finally…!), I expect that it will produce insights into fundamental particles that are equally as important — if not much more — than the discovery of new chemical elements. I say this because chemical elements are all made of the same “stuff”: protons, neutrons, and electrons. CERN would be discovering new particles that are entirely different, and possibly it will find evidence for long-sought-after things like the Higgs Boson, supersymmetry, and gravitons. Any of these three things would be far, far more significant than the discovery of any new element.

As an extrasolar planet scientist myself, I want to point out that the discovery of extrasolar planets has highlighted radical flaws in our old theories of planet formation. I agree that this is not as fundamentally important as the discovery of planets as worlds themselves, but it still managed to get the people who study planet formation all in a tizzy. Also, there are people like me who think seriously about how we might find and identify “biosignatures” in atmospheres of extrasolar planets. “Biosignatures” in this context are gases that are produced by life. The oxygen we breathe here on Earth is a great example of a one because it's produced almost exclusively by photosynthetic organisms and has extremely limited abiotic sources that are unlikely to produce detectable quantities of the gas.

Possibly science is getting harder (is there a good metric to measure this with?), but I don't think we're anywhere even close to hitting a peak. Even if science is getting harder, technology is getting better, and it's through technology that we do most of our science.