科学进步总是以葬礼为代价

导读

This article explores how researchers' innovative abilities change over their careers, revealing a striking pattern: scientists tend to become better at connecting existing ideas as they age, but lose their edge for disruptive, paradigm-shifting innovations. The study's findings explain the famous saying that "science advances one funeral at a time" from a data perspective, which gives me a new understanding of the life cycle of academic creativity and the power dynamics in scientific communities.

这篇文章探讨了科研工作者的创新能力随职业生涯变化的规律，揭开了一个很有意思的现象：科学家年纪越大，越擅长整合现有观点，但颠覆式创新的能力反而会下降。这项研究从数据角度解释了那句著名的“科学进步一次葬礼前进一步”的说法，让我对学术创造力的生命周期和科研圈的权力结构有了新的认知。

For centuries, science has been a top-heavy enterprise. A vanishingly small number of field-leading experts has the propensity to shape knowledge. They who win the Nobels. They who secure the multi-year, millions-of-dollars grants. They who rewrite the textbooks. Other workers in science are merely passing through, riding the coattails of these giants.

几百年来科研领域一直是“头重脚轻”的结构：只有极少数顶尖学者能真正定义学科的发展方向，他们拿诺贝尔奖，拿到动辄数百万美元的多年期科研经费，写出的成果能改写教科书，其余的科研从业者大多只是踩着这些巨人的肩膀前进，很难留下真正有长期影响力的成果。

But how does a researcher’s capacity for invention, innovation, and insight change over the course of a career in science? Even the giants seem to have something of a use-by date. In one year of publishing—1905—Albert Einstein turned physics on its head and revolutionized humanity’s understanding of our universe with his concepts of special relativity, mass energy equivalence (E=mc², anyone?), the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion. He was 26 years old. The shockwaves of the ideas contained in four papers continue to ripple through the fabric of spacetime and shape the intellectual evolution of our species. But toward the tail end of Einstein’s life, he argued strenuously against the concepts undergirding the emerging field of quantum mechanics, the ideas that are shaking up physics yet again and may lay bare even more of our universe’s mysteries.

但一个很值得讨论的问题是：科研人员的发明、创新和洞察力，会在整个职业生涯里发生什么样的变化？哪怕是学界泰斗似乎也有“保质期”。1905年26岁的爱因斯坦一年发表了四篇论文，提出狭义相对论、质能方程、光电效应和布朗运动相关理论，直接颠覆了整个物理学界，重新定义了人类对宇宙的认知，这些成果的影响直到今天还在推动整个学科发展。但到了晚年，他却极力反对新兴的量子力学核心概念，而恰恰是量子力学正在再次改写物理学，帮助人类揭开更多宇宙的奥秘。

Historians of science have long debated both the typical shape of a scientist’s output curve and the reasons for its particular slopes, traced throughout the arc of a career in research. Creativity declines with age. Or not. Young scientists are more likely to crack open a field and explore uncharted territory. Older researchers acquire the necessary experience and knowledge necessary to shift paradigms and point inquiry in new directions. And so on. Now, researchers from the universities of Pittsburgh and Chicago have proposed a new model. The key lies in splitting creativity into two separate expressions—novelty through recombining existing insights into new connective ideas and disruptive innovation, the Einsteinian flashes of brilliance that rewrite a field’s trajectory. By analyzing the output of more than 12 million scientists over the course of six decades, from 1960 to 2020, they find that researchers across the world tend to increase their capacity for connective novelty as they age and decrease in their ability to disrupt. They published their findings in *Science* last week.

科学史家长期以来一直在争论科学家产出曲线的普遍规律和背后的原因：有人说创造力随年龄增长下降，有人反对；有人说年轻学者更能打破学科边界探索未知，也有人说年长研究者经验知识更丰富，更有能力推动范式转移、指引新的研究方向，各类观点莫衷一是。现在匹兹堡大学和芝加哥大学的研究团队提出了一个新模型，核心是把创造力拆成两种完全不同的类型：一种是整合现有观点形成新关联的组合式创新，另一种是爱因斯坦式的、能直接改写整个学科发展轨迹的颠覆式创新。他们分析了1960到2020年六十年间超过1200万名科学家的研究产出，发现全球的科研人员普遍呈现出相同的规律：随着年龄增长，组合式创新的能力会不断提升，但颠覆式创新的能力却会持续下降。这项研究上周刚刚发表在《科学》期刊上。

The authors invoke Douglas Adam’s take on a life spent wandering through the intellectual wilds. “This life-cycle pattern accords with science-fiction author Douglas Adams’ observation about technological change,” they wrote. “What exists at one’s intellectual ‘birth’ feels normal, what appears during early career feels revolutionary, and what emerges after maturity feels suspect.” They contend that, as scientists age and their experience deepens, they become attached to the ideas upon which they built their career. This makes replacing this foundation harder as time wears on. But it also makes it more likely that they notice some connection between two or more established, familiar ideas. “Even the greatest minds, such as Einstein, transitioned from disruptor to gatekeeper when quantum mechanics threatened his nostalgic view of the universe,” they wrote. It was the Nobel laureate and quantum physicist Max Planck who wrote that “science advances one funeral at a time” (which is actually a somewhat artful translation of his original statement, in German) about revered gatekeepers and their nostalgia for insights past that keep leaps in scientific understanding from happening. Turns out, he may have been right.

研究作者还引用了道格拉斯·亚当斯对知识探索生命周期的描述：“这个规律和科幻作家道格拉斯·亚当斯对技术变革的观察完全契合：在你学术入门时已经存在的理论，你会觉得是理所当然的常规认知；在你职业生涯早期出现的新观点，你会觉得是革命性的突破；而等你进入成熟期之后再出现的新东西，你会觉得违背常识、值得怀疑。” 他们认为，随着科学家年龄增长、经验加深，会对自己职业生涯所依托的理论体系产生很深的情感认同，时间越久就越难接受这个根基被新理论替代，但同时他们也更能在不同的成熟理论之间找到关联点。“哪怕是爱因斯坦这样的伟大头脑，当量子力学威胁到他所认同的传统宇宙观时，也会从颠覆者变成现有体系的守门人。” 正如诺贝尔物理学奖得主、量子物理学家马克斯·普朗克说的那句名言：“科学的进步一次葬礼前进一步”（这句话其实是对他德语原文的艺术化翻译），说的就是那些受人尊敬的学术守门人对旧有理论的执念，往往会阻碍科学认知的飞跃。现在看来，他的说法可能真的是对的。

来源：https://nautil.us/is-this-why-science-advances-one-funeral-at-a-time-1280650