The Dor-Ment: Can artificial intelligence awaken the sleeping mind of science?
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This essay introduces the Dor-Ment as a metaphor for the immense reservoir of scientific ideas that have been proposed but remain dormant, incompletely absorbed, detached from their origins or periodically rediscovered. It examines this mechanism through the history of the meteorite-impact explanation for dinosaur extinction, focusing particularly on Max Walker De Laubenfels’s neglected 1956 hypothesis and its fragmented transmission through later scientific literature. The essay considers how an idea may remain intellectually asleep even when its citation continues to circulate, and asks whether artificial intelligence can help reconnect scientific thought with its partially forgotten ancestry. Artificial intelligence is presented not as a substitute for scholarship, judgment or verification, but as a potentially powerful instrument for searching, comparing and awakening the sleeping mind of science. This is neither an exhaustive history of dinosaur-extinction theories nor an argument that dinosaur extinction was caused exclusively by meteorite impact. Its principal subject is the dormancy, transmission, rediscovery and attribution of scientific ideas.
Author: van Dijk, Janpieter
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203701894
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