There is something rather odd about the current state of science. The funding for its prestigious institutions and mega projects now routinely runs to hundreds of millions, even billions, of pounds. And it is certainly productive, generating a tidal wave of papers every year published in its 25,000 academic journals. But ask what it all adds up to and those much heralded breakthroughs in understanding seem remarkably elusive.
This could be due, at least in part, to the law of diminishing returns, where science’s striking success necessarily imposes barriers to further advance. By the time it has (apparently) resolved the big questions of the origin of the universe, how the galaxies and our earth were formed, identified the earliest forms of life and cracked the genetic code, then what comes after could be an anticlimax.
For Rupert Sheldrake, science’s problems go much deeper than this.
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