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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking.

Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.

This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.

Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster CPU or a new clanker model.

I think there's this group of folks who are like "Why don't we have flying cars?" and eventually realize the problem is physics, but have to somehow blame people instead.

> This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed.

This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came relativity and the photoelectric effect. In the 1940s, after the second world war, atomics was the ultimate of physics, then we developed transistors. Until 1950s, sand was basically a worthless resource, and now, good quality silica commands a high price in the global marketplace. Truth is, there are many low-hanging fruit, we cannot even guess what we don't know when we don't know it. I wager that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

It's still possible to make ground-breaking innovations. In fact, they come with regularity, along with all the pulp that qualifies as research nowadays. Here's an example from my field: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/hits09/gentry-homomorphic-e...

"physics being solved" feels like it backs the original refinement point - we still use the formulas of Newtonian physics in non-extreme cases, and while those extremes definitely matter in important areas (nuclear power generation, semiconductors), they feel more like exceptional circumstances.

In any case, I agree with the argument for funding more general research because we don't know where the next advance will happen, and even a discovery that only applies in exceptional/narrow cases can have a lot of value.

Past performance is never a guarantee of future performance, that's a gambler's fallacy. Just because we found out more groundbreaking stuff before, doesn't mean we will continue to do so.

There are actually hard limits to things, too. For example, we basically can't make transistors any smaller. Like, physically it's not possible.

Then a PhD should not be given until a series of increments amount to something ground-breaking.

It still takes 3 - 5 years or more even for that incremental progress. It takes years to just catch up on the field! Do we expect PhD candidates to subsist on barely livable wages until they eventually publish a ground-breaking result? That kind of disincentive to even start a PhD would not be conducive at all to progress.

Yes, most PhD theses are scientific and commercial dead-ends (even more reason not to gate the degree on ground-breaking results!) but they do serve to cull the problem space, and that's exactly why we need more of them. In fact we should even provide some incentives to publish negative results in academia.

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