Why it is necessary to measure scientific progress sans Nobel Prize award

The notion that science is invested in by the state to secure awards for its scientists is laughable - but the idea that science should be pursued for its own sake is just pernicious

In an article in The Atlantic, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen express their concerns about the perceived slowdown of scientific progress. They note that there are “more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before.”

They ask whether this steadily rising investment of manpower and time in scientific research is yielding proportionately rising dividends, or whether we are “investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?”

As they concede, it’s unclear how to measure the rate of scientific progress. One problem is unambiguously assigning value or