Sunday, January 23, 2011

Things that stopped progressing: medicine and theoretical physics

I'm surprised more people haven't noticed that medical progress slowed way down after 1984.

It's not just medical science that's hit a wall. Lee Smolin's 2004 The Trouble With Physics claims physics has been frozen for decades. (At least physics has a book on this. I think physicians are in denial.)

What other sciences have stopped making progress? Biology seems to be very healthy ...

3 comments:

cathy said...

If biology is making progress, that should translate into medicine sooner or later.

Anonymous said...

How has the digitization/computerization of medicine affected things? Are the changes made by computers in the medical field mostly peripheral? I also keep reading about 'lab on a chip' style devices. Have those not materialized in actual usage?

I guess the big question is, what happens to the seemingly big breakthroughs on the way from the research community to actual usage? Are these breakthroughs just over-hyped in the first place?

And if medical progress has mostly stopped, does the huge increase in medical costs over the last three decades derive from a new class of rentiers?

Anonymous said...

True, when there is a major break through that can save billions of lives or cut energy costs by billions the military gets involved and shuts down the whole procedure before it can even reach the market.We have officially been denied the permission to make any further progress in these fields....