Abstract
90% of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today. By contrast, less than 7% of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. It has been estimated that there were a few hundred scientists in the mid-1700s. If the number of scientists had increased at the same rate as the overall population, the number of scientists today would be a few thousand. Instead, according to UNESCO, there are about eight million researchers in the world today. The increase in the number of scientists over the last couple of hundred years is thousands of times the increase in the overall population. The growth rate in the number of scientists since the mid-1700s has been about 4% per year, corresponding to a doubling time of about 18 years and far faster than the approximately 0.8% per year growth rate for the overall population over that period. Currently in China the number of researchers is increasing at the furious rate of 6.6% per year, while its overall population is growing at just 0.6 % per year. There is no question that the number of scientists has increased dramatically over the last few hundred years (see Fig. 4.1).
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Notes
- 1.
Larsen and von Ins (2010) The Rate of Growth in Scientific publication and the Decline in Coverage Provided by Science Citation Index.
- 2.
Bornmann and Mutz (2014) Growth Rates of Modern Science: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on the Number of Publications and Cited references.
- 3.
Doudna and Sternberg (2017) A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution.
- 4.
Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong.
- 5.
The atomic bomb is based on the splitting of uranium or plutonium nuclei, and the hydrogen bomb is based on the fusion of hydrogen nuclei to release energy. As physicists probed deeper and deeper into fundamental physics, would they find more subatomic processes that release huge amounts of energy? After almost 70 years of further research, the answer is yes. In late 2017 Marek Karliner and Jonathan Rosner showed that quarks—the constituents of protons and neutrons—can also fuse and release an amount of energy similar to that of hydrogen fusion in one case and ten times greater in another. At present the very short lifetimes of the quarks preclude any practical applications.
- 6.
Ripple et al. (2017).
- 7.
Nixey (2017) The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.
- 8.
Larson and Witham (1998) Leading scientists still reject God.
- 9.
Stirrat and Cornwall (2013) Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: a survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society.
- 10.
According to some definitions, agnosticism is as much a belief (“unknowable”) as are theism and atheism.
- 11.
Giles, J. (2005) Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head.
- 12.
This example comes from the excellent essay entitled “I, Pencil”, written by Leonard Read (1958).
Further Reading
Bornmann L, Mutz R (2014) Growth Rates of Modern Science: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on the Number of Publications and Cited References. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66.10.1002
Doudna JA, Sternberg SH (2017) A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York
Giles J (2005) Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head. Nature 438, 900
Larsen PO, von Ins M (2010) The Rate of Growth in Scientific Publication and the Decline in Coverage Provided by Science Citation Index. Scientometrics Vol. 84, p. 575
Larson EJ, Witham L (1998) Leading scientists still reject God. Nature 394, 313
Nixey C (2017) The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Macmillan, London
Ripple et al. (2017), World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. Bioscience Volume 67, Issue 12, p. 1026
Stirrat M, Cornwall RE (2013) Eminent scientists reject the supernatural: a survey of the Fellows of the Royal Society. Evolution, Education and Outreach 20136, 33
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Shaver, P. (2018). Science Today. In: The Rise of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91812-9_4
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