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I often wonder if we are progressing so quickly because we are much more capable than our 18th century natural philosophers ancestors at doing science or we are just living in a period of rapid growth due to unknown factors and it can stop or continue at any time.

Any evidence for either argument?

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  • It's almost certainly because we were raised in societies with advanced technology, improved methods and greater knowledge (which is to say we're not inherently smarter, we just have a huge head start). We also have high enough quality of life to make advancing our knowledge more accessible, and there are also just more people in general (meaning more people advancing our knowledge, even if the portion of people doing so stays the same).
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Jan 4 at 23:27
  • The technological growth out of electronics came about because of the very deep and low hanging fruit that the theory of electromagnetism that Maxwell and company presented, as well as the economic incentive structures and global industrialization allowed for. It turns out that if you discover how the fundamental forces work, you gain immense technological potential, if you also throw in the developemnt of automation based industries. It's not clear if we can leverage The Strong/Weak force the same way, as the electromagnetic. But, AI may allow a second boom, in other ways.
    – Michael Carey
    Commented Jan 4 at 23:30
  • Note: I would say its more that we benefit from compounding effects, and early exponential growth than any other variables. Turns out you cant develop the theory of biology or chemistry very well without a microscope, I think our ancestors were basically hardcapped in developemnt without having the tools to detect things like cells/atoms/forces. But, oncr we made the technological leap to having the capacity to detect these things, our theories were possible to expand, and technology followed suit.
    – Michael Carey
    Commented Jan 4 at 23:35

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I mean first of all what is "quickly"? Like if you know nothing and learn something that is an incredible pace un-matched by knowing something and adding more.

The other thing is that we might actually be more capable than 18th century folks in general due to a lack of malnutrition and a much better access to information. That being said those who were able to do science in the 18th century were likely well off and quite capable so not sure there's that much of a difference after all (evolution probably happens on longer time scales).

So I'd guess a major contributing factor is that this growth is to some extend self-propelling. So better nutrition, more spare time and information, leads to better tools, better nutrition, more spare time and more chances to research. So it's not that it's unknown factors. And more people being in a position of being well off and educated leads to more people being able to pursue their curiosities which further increases the knowledge and the tools to improve society and it's knowledge. So some sort of progress is just a matter of statistics, the question is just in what direction.

Now is that non-stop? Well up to a certain point the capabilities of a society increase with the number of it's members, but likewise the management overhead and the space requirements become more relevant. Also the amount of information changes from "too little", idk picture a medieval farmer and "too much" idk picture someone trying to read the entire Wikipedia. So knowledge is not just added it also gets lost so you either need to find compression algorithms that bring the complexity down so that all people can have knowledge and still have capacity left to add more or you might find yourself in a position where you just curate and conserve rather than add to it. Or knowledge might simply stagnate or even get lost because records are destroyed and experts die. Though our improved living conditions also made recording of history faster and easier (think of a portrait vs a selfie).

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