Year: 1997
Type: article
Abstract: According to modern cosmology, the universe began with a big bang about 10 billion years ago, and it has been expanding ever since. If the density of mass in the universe is great enough, its gravitational force will cause that expansion to slow down and reverse, causing the universe to fall back in on itself. Then the universe will end in a cataclysmic event known as “the Big Crunch.” I would like to present to you a vaguely analogous theory of the history of science. The upper curve on Figure 1 was first made by historian Derek da Solla Price, sometime in the 1950s. It is a semilog plot of the cumulative number of scientific journals founded worldwide as a function of time.
Source: Eos
DOI: 10.1029/97eo00213
Author: David Goodstein
Institution: California Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2138654707