[g00dn3ss]

Wow, I've never read that. Here's my favorite section:

'Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn't going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools.'

[yters]

It would be cool if scientist could record their research in a machine understandable format. Then people could either state their assumptions or conclusions and the computer would provide the other side, or state what information is missing.

[rms]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

[yters]

Oh, I know that scientist currently use computers to prove things. I mean as a general method of organizing and correlating knowledge that anyone could use. I've seen a similar project, an ontological Wikipedia, but it's probably too tedious for the general practitioner.

[Neoryder]

do we have the right tools yet? if not can why don't we try to think of what would help us with this massive and rapid doubling of knowledge.

[rms]

The internet has been a pretty good tool to take us this far.