My reasoning on this is that since everyone has a finite lifespan, understanding/work will be lost as the researcher retire, move to a different field, or die, unless this information is transmitted to someone else during their life time. However, as we understand more, we have to teach people more. This brings in two problems that I see:
- It takes longer for people to learn up to the frontier of science, which means they might be in their 30s, 40s, and that number may keep getting larger. - We might be able to teach these things in the same amount of time, but the understand of these topics by the younger generation might be less overall, which makes it difficult for them to make certain connections, as they might not have the deep enough understanding to see a connection.
My worry is the eventually we will reach a stage where the amount of knowledge we have is so much that no one can feasibly master a field. We can subdivide the fields, but no one will know enough general knowledge to make insightful connections that simplifies our models, or something to that effect.
As an example: my fluid dynamics professor said that the fluids mechanics I course we take in second year undergrad is what people worked on as their masters/phd thesis 100 years ago, whereas we don't even derive the formulas anymore now simply because we do not have the time to do so.