Doubling Time

One can rightly ask, though, how science and scientists continue to sustain an exponential pace of discovery. Back in the 1960s--the Jurassic days of computing--you wrote your scientific paper by hand. Background research required a trip to the library, where you would read anything you needed to know. You would also take copious notes, for photocopiers were not yet a common feature of the office environment. You gave the finished text to a typist, who typed it on a manual typewriter--complete with added typos. All the special mathematical characters were hand-drawn in place. Figures and diagrams were plotted by hand on graph paper and then farmed out to a graphic artist. The research paper was then mailed to the journal, with carbon copies kept for your records.

Nowadays, using the Internet, you choose keywords to search every published paper in nearly every astrophysics journal for material related to your own research. And it's done in a minute or two. You download any or all of these papers to your laptop computer (without its getting heavier for having done so) and read them at your leisure. You observe the universe from telescopes that are controlled in real time by a user-friendly interface on your PC. Your data are plotted and formatted within seconds while you "typeset" your manuscript using simple software tools provided by the journal that is publishing your work. And you submit the paper to an online service so that your colleagues around the world can read the final draft before the next day's morning coffee.

All exponential growth must end somewhere. It ends when our fecund algae have no lake left to take over. It ends when we reach the quantum limit to computing speeds. And of course, there cannot be more scientists than people on Earth. All true. But the end is not otherwise in sight. I cannot imagine what another half century will bring--three scientific doubling times and thirty Moore's law doublings of computing power. If exponential growth continues to hold, the early twenty-first century will look like a primitive era in which research moved like molasses and the real potential of the infant Internet had not yet been realized.

Modern science's golden age of discovery flows not from a particularly prodigious rate of research but from the consistency with which we have maintained the exponential growth of this research. By that measure, our golden age began with the Industrial Revolution and shows no sign of letting up. And there will be no rest for the weary textbook writers, who must continually rewrite new editions as they chase the cosmic frontier, just as they did a hundred years ago.

Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, is the Frederick P. Rose Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium and a visiting research scientist at Princeton University.

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