Experience, Theory, and Experiment (1955)

Abstract

Science today is much like government or big business: Scientists are specialists not only in a single science but even in a single problem, each a senior bureaucrat jealous of interference from the multitude of others whose actions are in turn as isolated as his own, and the multiplied sciences themselves are self-fecundating compartments which reproduce, if at all, by division. Everyone is an expert in something. We are accustomed to speaking of every scientist as a leader in a particular field, but often it is difficult to discern any following. That so many experts turn out so much research that no single person can know it all even in a single field, is often brought forward as proving the progress of science. Rate of working, nevertheless, is the product of force by velocity and is not necessarily increased if velocity approaches infinity while force approaches zero. There are costly efforts to gather and review the totality of the literature in various fields, but it might be fitter to find out who, if anyone, reads the typical paper of today.