The website Edge, has Kevin Kelly‘s Speculations on the future of science based on a talk he gave to the Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand, of the Foundation, introduces Kelly’s article:
Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society.
A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science.
A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science…
2000 BC — First text indexes
200 BC — Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
1000 AD — Collaborative encyclopedia
1590 — Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon)
1600 — Laboratory
1609 — Telescopes and microscopes
1650 — Society of experts
1665 — Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
1665 — Scholarly journals
1675 — Peer review
1687 — Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
1920 — Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
1926 — Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
1937 — Controlled placebo
1946 — Computer simulation
1950 — Double blind experiment
1962 — Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)…
Kevin Kelly suggests several new possible scientific methods: Compiled Negative Results, Triple Blind Experiments, Combinatorial Sweep Exploration, Evolutionary Search, Multiple Hypothesis Matrix, Pattern Augmentation, Adaptive Real Time Experiments, AI Proofs, Wiki-Science, Defined Benefit Funding, Zillionics, Deep Simulations, Hyper-analysis Mapping, and Return of the Subjective.
His article has some interesting speculation – but no mention of many areas in which scientific method in developing such as: scientific assessment, geographic information systems, citizen science and the extended peer-community, or meta-data.
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All Long Now talks can be downloaded from their website.