by Joseph Shieber

In a recent talk at the Santa Fe Institute, the software engineer and tech startup founder Jason Crawford, who has in the last few years devoted his time to the Roots of Progress nonprofit, offered suggestions for developing institutions capable of fostering the acceleration of scientific progress.
Crawford framed the discussion around three questions: “When (if ever) has science accelerated in the past? Is it still accelerating now? And what can we learn from that?”
On the first question, whether science has accelerated in the past, Crawford offers an unequivocal “yes,” noting, in a whirlwind history, that
In the ancient and medieval world, we had only a handful of sciences: astronomy, geometry, some number theory, some optics, some anatomy
In the centuries after the Scientific Revolution (roughly 1500s–1700s), we got the heliocentric theory, the laws of motion, the theory of gravitation, the beginnings of chemistry, the discovery of the cell, better theories of optics
In the 1800s, things really got going, and we got electromagnetism, the atomic theory, the theory of evolution, the germ theory
In the 1900s things continued strong, with nuclear physics, quantum physics, relativity, molecular biology, and genetics
Though Crawford’s survey of the historical trends is brief, he is undoubtedly correct (and has much more to say about the historical record of progress on the blog for his nonprofit, The Roots of Progress). Just to underscore the point, it would be worth it to look at a few measures highlighting the acceleration of science. Read more »