[brianlweiner]

John was a professor of mine, so I'll defend him a bit here :). To be clear, he's certainly a contrarian, and has a fairly pessimistic take on modern scientific progress.

I pushed back in class quite a bit about his 'End of Science' claims, and we disagreed frequently - but his actual claims are usually not as strong as they're made out to be. He simply doesn't see the same sort of practical gains being made from scientific research that we were making in the 19th and early 20th century.

If we look at the research being produced by obviously impressive scientific endeavors like LHC - I think you can see his point. We're obviously gaining knowledge, and negative results are still valuable, but we're investing more and more to make incremental progress in many fields and the actual research is becoming less and less accessible to the average person.

Anyway, it's not my job to defend John's work (he's more than capable of responding to critics) but I always found him to be interesting, patient and encouraging to his students. His class was one of my favorites and even if I disagree with his claims overall I don't think they deserve to be dismissed so readily.

[wongarsu]

I think everyone can agree that late 19th century up to the first half of the 20th century was an unusual time with many scientific breakthroughs. Science is moving much slower now, but it's still much faster than in the time before that.