Swiss Finance Institute

Research Paper Series

N°20-90
Are 'Flow of Ideas' and 'Research Productivity'
in secular decline?

Peter Cauwels
ETH Zurich

Didier Sornette
ETH Zurich, Southern University of Science and Technology
(SUSTech) Shenzhen, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and
Swiss Finance Institute
 Are ‘Flow of Ideas’ and ‘Research Productivity’ in secular decline?
Peter Cauwels 1 and Didier Sornette 1-4
1
ETH Zurich, Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Zurich, Switzerland
2
Institute of Risk Analysis, Prediction and Management (Risks-X), Academy for Advanced
Interdisciplinary Studies, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China
3
Tokyo Tech World Research Hub Initiative, Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of
Technology, Tokyo, Japan
4
Swiss Finance Institute, c/o University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

Abstract: It is widely held true that fundamental scientific knowledge has been accelerating exponentially
over the past centuries and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Moreover, endogenous growth
theory postulates that this exponential accumulation of knowledge is the main source of the ubiquitous
exponential economic growth. We test these claims by constructing two new series of knowledge indices,
one representing the historical evolution of the Flow of Ideas, the other of the Research Productivity, for the
time period between 1750 and 1988. Three different geographical regions are covered: 1) Continental
Europe, 2) the United Kingdom, and 3) the United States; and two disciplines: a) the physical sciences, and
b) the life sciences. Our main result is that scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the
early 1970s for the Flow of Ideas and since the early 1950s for the Research Productivity. We also observe
waves coinciding with the three industrial and technological revolutions, in particular in the United Kingdom.
Overall, our results support the Kuhnian theory of knowledge creation through scientific revolutions,
punctuation and paradigm shifts and falsify the gradualism that lies at the basis of the currently prevailing
economic paradigm of endogenous growth.

Keywords: research productivity, knowledge accumulation, economic growth, endogenous growth,

exponential growth, S-curve, technological progress, discovery, invention, innovation, scientific revolutions

JEL: C80, H50, J24, O30, O31, O40, O50

1
1. Introduction

Over the past millennia, the human-earth system has gone through a profound process of transformation,
which has permeated through all of its segments, from technology and economics, through demographics,
health, food, energy, wealth creation, poverty and inequality, education, democracy, violence, war and more.
The website Our World In Data1, a collaborative effort between the University of Oxford and the non-profit
organization Global Change Data Lab, has been gathering a valuable set of data and research documenting
this fundamental reshaping of the human-earth system over the past centuries. When looking at this
extensive resource, and the compelling story it tells about the evolution of mankind in relation with its
environment, two most prominent questions arise: 1) What is the nature of this change? And, 2) Can this
process continue in perpetuity?

The quest for a deeper understanding of the nature and the destination of progress has been ongoing for
centuries and has resulted in a vast body of research covering all possible domains in the fundamental and
the social sciences. To give a comprehensive review is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, without
the ambition of being exhaustive, let us give a broad overview of the major schools of thought that have
materialized from this collective effort.

Perhaps one of the most ambitious approaches, in trying to understand the formation of history from a first
principles point of view, comes from the complex systems research field (e.g. see Refs [1-5]). Devezas and
Modelski [3] describe the evolution of what they call the world system as a cascade of processes following a
power law, where the frequency of evolutionary innovations is inversely proportional to their importance,
similar to Zipf’s law. At the lowest level of the hierarchy lie the technological innovations, followed by radical
changes in political structures, beliefs, ideologies, social organization, and so on. With each step up in the
hierarchy, the frequency of occurrence decreases, events are separated by longer time intervals, but they
have an increasing impact on the formation and shaping of the world system. The authors claim that progress
is pushed forward by a process of self-organized criticality with major innovations behaving like earthquakes.
These should not be seen as statistical outliers, but as characteristic “periodic rearrangements of the world
system, in order to accommodate its changing size and complexity”. They argue that this system of
punctuated equilibria eventually follows a logistic S-curve progress, which has brought us through ancient
and classical times into the current modern times. The authors conclude that around the year 2000, the
world system had reached about 80% completion of its dynamical learning process, and that in the long run,
it will saturate.

The question whether human progress follows a saturating S-curve shape of diminishing returns, or a
succession of S-shape curves, or a hockey-stick J-curve shape of proportional or increasing returns, has
divided researchers for centuries. If growth would eventually be limited by the availability of rival goods
(things), including the environmental resources of the Earth, then it is bound to saturate over the long run
and follow a logistic process (the S-curve), barring expansions to develop livable subsurface environments
for humans in oceans and/or conquer other planets in the Solar system. This has been described centuries
ago by Malthus and Ricardo (see Warsh [6]). It is a viewpoint that strongly resonates, in more recent times,
with the system theory thinking of Boulding and his famous exclamation, “Anyone who believes exponential
growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist” [7]; and, it is also a strong
belief that is deeply rooted in the environmental sciences and sustainability movements, see for example,
the Limits to Growth report commissioned by the Club of Rome [8], the Doughnut Economy of Raworth [9],
the Planetary Boundaries of Steffen et al. [10], the Safe Operating Space for Humanity by Rockström et al.
[11] and the Ecological Footprint, introduced by Rees [12].

Some economists are seeing the end of growth in what they call “the Productivity Puzzle”, the fact that
economic productivity has been declining over the past half century, even though we have the impression

1
http://www.ourworldindata.org/

2
that innovation has been increasing at a breakneck pace. According to Gordon [13] and Cowen [14], much of
the economic growth that we have seen in the centuries before the 1970s was the result of one-offs. Take,
for example, the exploitation of fossil fuels and of the environment, the transformation of an unschooled
population to an educated one, the taming of the wilderness and the conquering of new land to use, or the
revolutionary change that came with the connected house, which brought electricity at our fingertips,
modern plumbing with streaming water, gas, central heating and sanitation, or telephone lines for instant,
long-distance communication. Once the low hanging fruit of technological progress is picked, it takes ever-
more effort and expenses to start reaching for the higher branches. Consequently, in the past fifty years,
economic growth and productivity started decreasing and eventually stagnated (see Sornette and Cauwels
[15-16]). This was further aggravated by the decline in new investments under pressure of the massive debt
overhang in the public and the private sector, and the increasing expenses to cover health care services and
pension liabilities of an aging population.

On the other side of the spectrum are the continuous-growth advocates. In their view, growth comes from
new ideas, which are nonrival goods. They claim that humanity is pushed forward by technological progress,
which is fueled by innovation and the flow of ideas [17]. To increase the productivity of each person in an
economic system using things (like a computer), you need to give each person such a thing. Economic output
per capita, under such conditions, is proportional to the capital per person, which leads to diminishing
returns2. On the other hand, you can increase the productivity of any number of people in an economic
setting by inventing a single new idea. Economic output per capita, under such conditions, is proportional to
the total stock of ideas [18], which leads to proportional returns. The closer humanity comes to reaching a
boundary, the stronger the incentive to find solutions and substitutions. The generation of new ideas makes
unlimited growth possible, so that it follows an exponential, or, if there are positive feedback mechanisms,
even a super-exponential trajectory (the J-curve). In economics, this viewpoint is reflected in the creative
destruction of the Schumpeterian growth model of Aghion and Howitt, and the endogenous growth theory
of Romer [See Ref. 18 and references therein]; in technology, there is the prediction of the singularity and
the coming of the age of trans-humanism by Kurzweil [19]; and, looking at the whole of the human-earth
system, it is at the foundation of the envisioned decoupling of human welfare from environmental impact as
endorsed by the Ecomodernist manifesto [20].

These two opposing viewpoints predict a fundamentally different future for humanity. According to Stent
[21], we are going through “the end of progress” and will soon be seeing the “coming of the golden age”.
Hogan refers to this as the “end of science”, convinced that “most new knowledge will merely extend and fill
in our current maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions” [22]. Based on a meta-study of 13 different
datasets of important evolutionary turning points, called milestones, Modis comes to the conclusion that we
are “sitting on top of the world”, that we have “reached the maximum rate of growth for complexity and
that, in the future, complexity’s rate of change (and the rate of change in our lives) will be declining” …
“people who will still be alive in 2026 - i.e., the generation of people born in the mid-1940s or later - will have
witnessed before they die all the change that can ever take place” [23]. The consequence of all this, according
to Douthat [24], is that we live in a “decadent society”, characterized by stagnation in the domain of
technology and economics, and social, cultural, intellectual and institutional exhaustion. The richest societies
in human history have collectively decided not to reproduce, there is a documented, increasing lack of
physical sexual desire, culturally and intellectually we suffer from repetition with countless prologues or
epilogues of Star Wars, Transformers or similar Disney and Netflix series, and the strength of our institutions
is decaying under the influence of lobbyists and special interest groups, short-term fixes and polarization
[24].

Kurzweil, on the other hand, does not see diminishing or proportional, but accelerating returns in
technological progress, such as computational capacity, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics,
nanotechnology and genetics [25]. When the growth rate itself is growing, which is the case for accelerating

2
‘The first barrel of fertilizer does wonders for a plot of land; the tenth only burns the crop.’ (see Warsh [6]).

3
returns, the process deviates from exponential and becomes hyperbolic. Mathematically, at some point,
infinite growth may be reached in a finite time period. In physics, this is called a finite-time singularity (see
chapter 10 of [4] and [26-28]). At that moment, according to Kurzweil, the human species will transcend
biology. This will mark the beginning of the age of trans-humanism characterized by a greatly enhanced
human intelligence and physiology.

So, shall we witness maximum complexity in 2026 as Modis predicts [23], or, shall we cross the event horizon
of the technological singularity in 2045 according to Kurzweil’s vision [19]? “Gouverner, c’est prévoir”
(Governing is the art of planning and predicting). This quip by Émile de Girardin, the 19th century French
journalist and politician, comes to mind when going through this review. Only by measuring, monitoring and
predicting can one really shape an informed view to manage and govern [15]. Gaining a better understanding
of the possible future scenarios for the human-earth system is a matter of great importance. Take for
example the issue of population growth. Should it be halted, to fight climate change and environmental
damage, as Ripple et al. [29] suggest in a recent publication that was signed by 11,000 scientists from a broad
range of disciplines? Or, more in line with endogenous growth theory, could it be that “population growth is
not detrimental for growth but is even needed to ensure sufficient innovation” and that “it may help the
economy during the transition phase by increasing the chances of developing efficient technologies” as
defended by Bretschger [30]? In short, could it be that we need more people to generate more ideas, to find
substitutions and solutions to push through the boundaries of the human-earth system?

Natural scientists and social scientists (in particular economists) seem to be unable to agree whether
population growth is good or bad for the human-earth system. One school predicts accelerating returns in
technology leading to a singularity, the other sticks with diminishing returns, stagnation and the end of
science and progress. This seems to be the present dramatic state of the research field of technological
progress and social change. We propose that one significant reason for this is that the flow of new ideas, or
the accumulation of knowledge is not well understood as a process and is most often treated as a “given”, a
parameter in a deductive model. But what exactly constitutes this flow of new ideas? Can it be measured?
And, how does it progress over time? This is the research question that we will tackle in this paper. We
acknowledge that this is a daunting task, prone to many shortcuts, analogies, biases and subjective reasoning.
We take up the challenge anyway and will, 1) come up with a definition of what constitutes the flow of ideas
at a certain time; 2) assemble an innovative dataset so that the former can be measured quantitatively; and,
3) introduce a set of historical indices showing the flow of ideas and the research productivity over the past
250 years, in different scientific disciplines and geographical regions.

2. Diagnostics and definitions

2.1 A very brief history of progress and growth

Between the ending of the American civil war, in 1865, and the beginning of the first world war in 1914, the
Western world experienced, what Vaclav Smil calls, “the greatest technical watershed in human history” [31].
In this period, merely two generations long, there was a unique clustering of fundamental scientific
discoveries, which would be at the basis of many great inventions and innovations of the late nineteenth and
the twentieth century. Over a period of roughly 100 years, before the oil crisis of the early 1970s, Western
society would be profoundly transformed. According to Smil, there has been only one instance in human
history that saw a comparable speed of technological progress. This happened during the Han dynasty in
China (207 B.C.E – 9 C.E.): “The concatenation of Han advances laid strong technical foundations for the
development of the world’s most persistent empire – which was, until the 18th century also the world’s
richest economy…”. This is a very interesting observation as it challenges the prevailing Western-centered
viewpoint of a succession of industrial revolutions from the steam engine in industry 1.0, electricity in

4
industry 2.0, the transistor in industry 3.0 up to the Internet of Things in industry 4.03. It also shows that
technological progress is not a continuous and steady process, from industry 1.0 up to industry 4.0, like the
different deployments of a software package, but is discontinuous and punctuated.

A completely different picture is sketched by the idea-based growth models that constitute the currently
ruling paradigm in economics, the endogenous growth theory. Bloom et al. [32] explain that “As a matter of
accounting, we can decompose the long-run growth rate into the product of two terms: the effective number
of researchers and their research productivity”, and that, “The overwhelming majority of papers on economic
growth published in the past decade are based on models in which research productivity is constant.” The
authors present some compelling evidence that this premise is fundamentally flawed and that in fact
productivity is slowing down. With respect to Moore’s law, they calculated that “the number of researchers
required to double chip density today is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early
1970s ... Research productivity in this case is declining sharply, at a rate of 7% per year”. The same can be
observed in crop seed yields and mortality improvements associated with cancer and heart diseases, with a
declining productivity of 5% per year. And, looking at firm-level data, research productivity declines at a rate
of 8-10% per year dependent on the data source. But how does this align with the fact that, over the last two
centuries, real GDP per capita has been increasing at a steady exponential growth rate, for example of 2% in
the US (see e.g. Lera and Sornette [33])? Bloom et al. answer this question by pointing out that the decline
in research productivity is offset by increased research effort, so that the product of both terms stays
constant and economic growth can continue, admittedly at a higher cost.

This offers only a partial explanation, and we have to dig deeper into the nature of knowledge and the
progress it creates to gain a full understanding of the problem. The fact is that not all new ideas have the
same impact. Some may be revolutionary. Using the terminology of Kauffman et al. [34], those are
“collectively autocatalytic”, and have the potential to create a new economic niche of “complements”4 and
“substitutes” after initiation. Other ideas may be only developmental, with a very limited autocatalytic
potential. According to Thiel [35], progress, or the impact of ideas, can take one of two forms: “Horizontal or
extensive progress means copying things that work – going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine
because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things – going
from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever
done.”

2.2 Definitions of elementary components of progress and growth

In order to better understand “the Flow of Ideas”, we need to distinguish between their different origins,
namely whether a new idea stems from a discovery, an invention or an innovation. These terms are often
mixed up without much further thought, but in fact they have a very specific meaning and should only be
used in their right context. By looking at their semantic roots, one can immediately get a better
understanding of the hierarchy of ideas.

Definition of “discovery”: A discovery is the first-time observation or recognition of something already

existing. This could be a physical thing, like a new mine or an oil well, a continent, an island, a moon, planet,
star, a fundamental particle (such as the electron or a neutrino), and so on. But it can also refer to something
intangible, an insight, like the discovery of a fundamental law of nature. Discovery is the result of a process
of exploration, that is a high-risk endeavour into the unknown, with the willingness to employ substantial

3
This very simplistic viewpoint of industry 1.0 up to 4.0 is a classical example of the WEIRD bias; it transpires a
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic worldview.
4
For example, with the car came its complements, among them gasoline, paved roads, motels, fast food
restaurants and suburbia. In turn suburbia gave rise to an enormous number of consumers of automobiles,
gasoline, paved roads and so on. Each component helps create the economic environment and market for the
others and all mutually benefit [34].

5
expenses without any certainty for future results or returns. To use the words of the opening lyrics of the
Star Trek television series, discovery is “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.

Definition of “invention”: An invention is the creation of something new. This could be a mechanical machine
like a steam engine, a mathematical algorithm, like artificial intelligence, or a chemical process like the Haber-
Bosch ammonia synthesis to produce fertilizers, or the Bessemer process to decarbonize iron in the
production of steel. Inventions are the result of a creative process of engineering, often combined with
stubborn trial-and-error tinkering, and a large dose of luck. However, they can also be the brainchild of
deductive scientific reasoning. As such, discoveries of fundamental scientific laws can be strong catalysts of
new waves of inventions.

Definition of “innovation”: Finally, an innovation is when you combine existing technologies in a novel way
to solve a problem, optimize a process or bring a new product or service to the market5. Innovation is an
exploitative process that takes advantage of prior creative inventions and explorative discoveries. It is
diametrically opposed to discovery in the way that it is a low-risk endeavour into charted territory where one
has a fair chance to make a decent estimation of the prospects of future results.

In this paper, we will measure the “Flow of Ideas” and the “Research Productivity”, which, as explained by
Bloom et al. [32], are the two fundamental drivers of economic growth. It is clear that not every idea qualifies
for inclusion, so we need to be very specific in our definitions. That is why the semantics that we explained
above really matter.

Definition of “Flow of Ideas”: We define the “Flow of Ideas” in a specific year in a certain scientific discipline
and geographical region as the number of elite practitioners to be professionally active in that exact cross-
section of time, discipline and region. With “professionally active”, we mean that: 1) they are alive in that
year; 2) they are older than, or equal to 25 years, and, 3) they are younger than 75 years6. With “elite
practitioners”, we mean that they have been selected by way of “community voting”. Concretely, this means
that they have been acknowledged in reference works for their contribution to the body of discoveries and
inventions. In this, we imply that only discoveries and inventions contribute to the body of knowledge.
Innovations, on the other hand, do not contribute to, but use the existing body of knowledge. In the
remainder of this document, we will call these “elite practitioners” protagonists.

Definition of “Research Productivity”: Bloom et al. [32] define the “Research Productivity” as the “Flow of
Ideas” divided by “the number of researchers”. We propose to take the total population in a region as a proxy
for “the number of researchers” (up to a constant of proportionality of the order of 0.1% as a global
average)7. The ratio between the two is the number of protagonists per million inhabitants, which will be our
final proxy for “Research Productivity”.

5
Alan Kay, the American computer scientist who made significant contributions to object-oriented programming
and the graphical user interface, makes a very clear distinction between invention and innovation. In a youtube
interview, he explains that, whether a team will come up with innovations or inventions strongly depends on the
management style and the composition of the team:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY6XqmMm4YA&feature=youtu.be (last accessed: September 2020)
6
In this, we, somewhat arbitrarily, assume that a professional career spans the 50-year period between the age
of 25 and 75, and, that it ends when a protagonist dies before the age of 75.
7
Using the population as a proxy for ‘the number of researchers’ will give an overestimation of the research
productivity, as there is plenty of evidence that the fraction of actual researchers in the population has been
increasing (UNESCO Science Report: towards 2030, Second revised edition 2016, published by the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 7, place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07, France;
https://en.unesco.org/unescosciencereport).

6
2.3 Motivation and justifications for using people to measure the Flow of Ideas

We explained that we count the number of professionally active elite practitioners in a particular year and
use that as a measure of the Flow of Ideas. One might argue that a more straightforward way could simply
be taking the sum of the number of actual discoveries and inventions made in each year. The fault with this
approach is first an unrealistic attribution of a well-defined time to the discovery that ignores the complex
maturation and creative processes at play. Moreover, how does one qualify a key discovery? "Beauty is in
the eye of the beholder", while we need a principled selection mechanism. We argue that identifying and
qualifying key discoverers and inventors is likely to be less biased for the measurement of the flow of
discoveries than determining the discoveries themselves. This is because there is an implicit community
``voting’’ mechanism at the origin of the recognition of protagonists, which make the selection well-defined
and in general sanctioned by well-recognized scholarly societies. We thus use the databases assembled by
Asimov and Krebs to extract the discoverers and inventors and not the discoveries and inventions
themselves.”

To illustrate the nature of the problem, let us compare the two approaches using the “discovery” of quantum
mechanics as an example. By scanning all Nobel Prizes in Physics that are published on the official website of
the Nobel Committee8, and selecting those who contributed to the theory of quantum mechanics, we are
able to disaggregate objectively the fundamental discoveries that are composing the overall “discovery” of
quantum mechanics. The result is presented in Table 1. It can be seen that there are ten discoveries coming
from nine elite practitioners, as Heisenberg contributed both with his Matrix theory and Uncertainty
principle.

Year Discovery What happened in that year? Protagonist Birth Death

1900 Theory of quanta Solved the problem Max Planck 1858 1947
1913 Theory of hydrogen atom Proposed the theory Niels Bohr 1885 1962
1922 Waves as particles Did experiment Arthur Compton 1892 1962
1924 Particles as waves Introduced the idea Louis de Broglie 1892 1987
1925 Matrix theory Formulated the theory Werner Heisenberg 1901 1976
1925 Exclusion principle Introduced the principle Wolfgang Pauli 1900 1958
Statistical interpretation of Contributed to the further
1925 Max Born 1882 1970
the wave function development
1926 Wave theory Formulated the equation Erwin Schrodinger 1887 1961
1927 Uncertainty principle Proposed the theory Werner Heisenberg 1901 1976
1928 Relativistic quantum theory Formulated the theory Paul Dirac 1902 1984

Table 1: The discoveries that led to the theory of quantum mechanics and were awarded with a Nobel Prize
in Physics.

When doing this simple exercise, it immediately becomes clear that it is practically impossible and quite
artificial to associate one single year with each of these discoveries. The years that are mentioned in the table
are taken from the brief motivation of the Nobel Committee. We also added a short phrasing explaining the
reason why each reference year was chosen. It can be seen that there are different reasons. Sometimes, it
was chosen because that was the time when a problem was completely solved, or a vital experiment was
carried out. Often it corresponds to the year when a new theory or equation was proposed, introduced,
formulated… Undoubtedly, most protagonists started their research many years before and continued
processing new ideas, instigated from their discovery, for many years after the reference year in the table.
Take for example Max Planck’s proposal that radiation consists of quanta with specific energies determined
by a new fundamental constant. One could argue that the flow of ideas leading to the theory of quanta
started when Kirchhoff formally stated the problem of black-body radiation in 1859. Or, only focusing on
Max Planck, one could use the year 1894 as start date, when he turned his attention to the problem. When
looking at the discoveries in the table from this perspective, it becomes clear that they do not contribute to
the Flow of Ideas as single events in one particular year.

8
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-physics/

7
Because it is impossible to pinpoint the exact years when ideas are generated around a new discovery, we
decided to use the discoverers and inventors as basis and let them contribute to the Flow of Ideas for the
full length of their professional careers. As we explained, we defined this as the period during which, 1) they
are alive, 2) they are older than, or equal to 25 years, and, 3) they are younger than 75 years. With this
approach, we respect the fact that they are the people who generate new ideas, and that this cannot be
pinpointed to one single year but happens throughout their professional lives. By selecting the elite
practitioners, we only consider the generators of those large-impact ideas that are the discoveries and
inventions of the past. In this way, our methodology also becomes objective and reproducible.

Figure 1 shows the result of applying this methodology to the observations in Table 1. One could call this the
Flow of Ideas index for quantum mechanics. The y-axis shows the number of elite practitioners from the
table that are alive in each year. It can be seen that the index rose sharply, between 1900 and 1925, from
the year when Planck solved the black-body-radiation problem. It peaked between 1925 and 1955 and
decreased afterwards as the theory became mature and the number of new ideas abated.

10
Number of elite practitioners alive

0
1900 1920 1940 1960 1980
Figure 1: Modelling of the Flow of Ideas in quantum mechanics, based on the elite practitioners presented
in table 1.

3. Data sources

We select our protagonists from Krebs’ Encyclopaedia of Scientific Principles9 [36] and Asimov’s Chronology
of Science and Discovery10 [37]. Both sources give an overview of the most important historical discoveries,
principles, laws, theories, hypotheses, and concepts11. We use these sources to construct two sets of indices
representing the Flow of Ideas and the Research Productivity in the basic sciences, distinguishing between
the two broad categories of the physical sciences12 and the life sciences13. In addition, we cover three distinct
geographical regions: the European Continent14, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Each item of fundamental scientific knowledge that is documented in any of the two sources is manually
checked and linked to one or more protagonists (being their discoverers or inventors). For example, the Crick-
Watson Theory of DNA is linked both to Francis H. C. Crick and to James Watson. In this way, we create two

9
We will refer to this as the “Encyclopaedia”.
10
We will refer to this as the “Chronology”.
11
We will refer to this as an “item of fundamental scientific knowledge”.
12
In our dataset, the physical sciences consist of Astronomy, Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Physics, Physical
and Analytical Chemistry, Geography, Geology and Meteorology
13
In our dataset, the life sciences consist of Biology, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Organic Chemistry, Medicine,
Genetics, Anthropology and Paleontology
14
We will explain later how this is defined.

8
extended datasets of protagonists, one based on the Encyclopaedia, the other based on the Chronology. The
indices are constructed for the time period between 1750 and 1988. Before 1750, observations are too
sparsely distributed. Asimov’s last record of an attribution to the body of fundamental scientific knowledge
was in 1988. To guarantee consistency in the dataset, we will use 1988 as our end year. As the indices will
be calculated from the datasets, we decided that both datasets will only contain protagonists that were born
after 1700.

For protagonists who moved during their life, the country of longest residence is chosen. For example, after
Enrico Fermi received his Nobel Prize in Physics, at the age of 37, he did not return home to Italy, but
continued to New York City with his family. He stayed in the United States until his death 15 years later, in
1954. As he spent the larger part of his life in Italy, that will be Fermi’s principal country.

We study four different geographical regions: 1) Continental Europe, 2) the United Kingdom, 3) the United
States, and 4) all regions (which is the aggregate of 1), 2) and 3)). As the notion of Continental Europe is only
vaguely defined, we decided to add to this region only those countries that had at least 10 protagonists, born
after 1700, in both datasets. When applying this rule to our specific datasets, Continental Europe will be
defined as the aggregate of Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden. The most
prominent absent country in the list is Austria, which had 9 records in the Encyclopaedia but 21 in the
Chronology. The Austrian empire dissolved after the first world war. Thus, besides the fact that we do not
have 10 records in the Encyclopaedia, the country cannot be seen as a stable entity throughout the
timeframe of our analysis. Additionally, we decided not to add Russia, with 13 records in the Encyclopaedia
and 19 records in the Chronology, to Continental Europe. Geographically, including the Russian federation
would extend the range of Continental Europe, but also, we did not find trustworthy population data before
1950.

Table 2 gives an overview of the number of protagonists per country and per scientific discipline in both
datasets. The Encyclopaedia contains 495 and the Chronology contains 689 records. Each record provides
the date of birth and death, research field, research cluster and principal country of residence of the
protagonist. To summarize, these are records of protagonists that were born after 1700, live in one of the
countries in table 2 and were active either in the life sciences or the physical sciences.

Table 2: Number of protagonists per country and per scientific discipline in both datasets

As expected, there is an overlap between the two databases, 284 records appear in both sets, that is 57% of
the Encyclopaedia and 41% of the Chronology. To construct the final indices from the two distinct datasets,
and, in order to avoid double-counting, records that appear in both will be given a ½ weight while the others
will be given a weight of 1.

9
It is worthwhile mentioning here that Krebs strongly adheres to the vision of a continuous exponential growth
of fundamental scientific knowledge. This is vividly expounded in his introduction to the Encyclopaedia where
he states that “… testing theories and hypotheses in a controlled situation developed late in human history
and thus science, as we think of it, was slow to advance in ancient times. The development and
implementation of scientific processes increased the ‘‘growth of knowledge,’’ as well as the rate of growth
of science from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. During this period, science accelerated at an
astounding exponential pace, and this growth will most likely continue throughout the twenty-first century
and beyond ...” He never put this hypothesis to a quantitative test, though, and this is what we do here based
on his own dataset.

4. Methodology

4.1 Temporal bias in recognising protagonists in the recent past

It is important to understand that the recognition of a scientist as a “protagonist”, for example as the
discoverer of a new fundamental scientific principle, or the inventor of a new device, process or algorithm,
is a time-dependent stochastic process. There is always a real possibility that some, who have lived over the
past centuries, were never acknowledged for their work, and as such, have not been included in the
Encyclopaedia or the Chronology. If such omissions were random over time, this would not impact the
historical trajectory of the indices, and no correction would be needed. However, given the fact that it takes
time to be recognized, a time bias occurs because protagonists from earlier times are less likely to be ignored
than their peers who are still alive today. A protagonist, who found a new principle 100 years ago for instance,
would have a head start of a century to be recognised with respect to a colleague being active now. This
leads to a bias that is time dependent: an important discovery in the recent past is quite unlikely to be
recognised as such immediately, except for some rare cases, making our databases underestimating the true
number of protagonists in the recent past. Such a protagonist will be acknowledged perhaps a few years or
decades later, possibly beyond the time window of our databases. The delay inherent in recognising great
scientific contributions leads to a deficit of recognised protagonists in our databases in the recent years and
decades. We thus need to correct for this bias. Our procedure to correct for this temporal bias is presented
in the Appendix.

4.2 Precise construction of the indices

We construct two series of indices:

• The first index Iflow of “Flow of Ideas” gives, for each year between 1750 and 1988, the number of
protagonists, from different scientific disciplines and geographical areas, that are professionally
active.
• The second index Iprod of “Research Productivity” gives the per capita (per million) result of the first
index. The population data are taken from the Maddison Project Database 2018 [38], where any
missing values are linearly interpolated.

We merge the two datasets (Krebs and Asimov) to define single indices, per scientific discipline and region.
For that, different steps must be taken. Let us meticulously explain how this is done:

1. We begin with the Encyclopaedia dataset and select those records that correspond to the specific
region and the scientific discipline of the index we want to construct. This gives us a list of
protagonists that were born after 1700.
2. For every year between 1750 and 1988, we take the sum of the number of protagonists that are
professionally active as defined above by the three conditions. When we make the sum, those
protagonists that occur in both datasets are given a weight of ½; the others get a weight of 1.

10
 3. The time bias correction factors 𝐶(𝑇) given by equation (A3) in Appendix A are calculated using the
following parameters: 1) Tend = 2007; 2) the number of successive successes (after k failures): r = 1;
and, 3) the probability of success in each trial: p = 2%. We multiply the sums calculated in the
previous step by these correction factors 𝐶(𝑇) to obtained corrected sums, which are now largely
free of the time bias.
4. We repeat this procedure for the Chronology. The only difference in this analysis is that now Tend is
put equal to 1988. The reason for that is that both reference books were written at different times,
and will, as a consequence, be subject to different time biases15.
5. The sum of both series, corrected for time bias, gives us the final indices.

5. Results

5.1 The Flow of Ideas and Research Productivity indices

Before presenting the Flow of Ideas (Iflow) and the Research Productivity indices (Iprod), for the different
regions and scientific disciplines, we need to understand the sensitivity of the time-bias correction to its
parameters. Figure 2 shows Iflow and figure 3 shows Iprod for all sciences and all regions combined, using
different probabilities of success in each trial (p = 1%, 2%, 3% and 4%), as defined in Appendix A. The
corrections are the larger, the smaller is the probability p of ‘success’ (i.e. that a protagonist is recognized in
a given year). No correction corresponds to p=100%. For p=2%, there is a 64% chance (1-(1-p)50 = 1 – 0.9850),
that the protagonists will be recognized during their career. For p=4%, this probability jumps to 87% while
for p=1%, it is just 39.5%. We consider this value as the lowest p to consider as it would imply that more than
60% of protagonists (great discoverers and inventors) have been ignored, which seems implausible.

From these highly aggregated indices, some first conclusions can be drawn:

• No matter what time bias correction factor is used, it is clear that scientific knowledge has been in
secular decline since the early 1970s for the Flow of Ideas indices and since the early 1950s for the
Research Productivity indices. Moreover, because we use the general population as a proxy for the
number of researchers, this decline is in fact underestimated.
• Research productivity is not constant. One can observe two waves, one around 1780 and another
around 1820, which coincide with the first industrial revolution; a steady increase, between 1850
and 1910, that quantitatively demonstrates the occurrence of the technological revolution; and a
further acceleration, cusping in a clear peak at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s, coinciding with
the post-war boom of the electronic revolution. After that, all indices are in steady decline.
• This pattern is much more pronounced when we specifically look at the United Kingdom (see the
red line in the bottom plot of figures 4-6).
• The fact that the temporal patterns of the Flow of Ideas and Research Productivity indices coincide
with the industrial and technological revolutions provides a validation step of our index construction
methodology.

15
An alternative approach would be to remove the records that occur in both datasets from the Chronology and
give all records a weight of 1 in the Encyclopaedia. The present methodology was prefered as the more
conservative of the two because the time bias correction factors for the Chronology are higher than those for
the Encyclopaedia in every single year. This is caused by the different end dates, 2007 for the Encyclopaedia and
1988 for the Chronology.

11
 800

700

600
Flow of Ideas index (Iflow)
500

400

300

200

100

0
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
no correction p=1% p=2%
p=3% p=4%
Figure 2: Flow of Ideas index, for all sciences and all regions, using different time bias correction factors
corresponding to different yearly probabilities p of recognition (see Appendix A for details). Note that the
no correction case corresponds to p=100%. The largest correction for time bias is for p=1%, which is an
extreme value for the correction corresponding to assume that more than 60% of protagonists are never
recognized during their professional career.

1.80

1.50
Research Productivity index (Iprod)

1.20

0.90

0.60

0.30

0.00
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
no correction p=1% p=2%
p=3% p=4%

Figure 3: Research Productivity index, for all sciences and all regions, using different time bias correction
factors corresponding to different yearly probabilities p of recognition (see Appendix A for details).

12
We now disaggregate the indices of figures 2 and 3 and present in figures 4-7 the results for different
scientific disciplines and different regions separately, using the correction factor 𝐶(𝑇) (equation (A3)) for
time bias with a yearly probability p of recognition equal to the conservative value 2%. Figures 4-7 confirm
the main conclusions drawn from figures 2-3 and allow us to conclude that knowledge is not homogeneously
distributed in space or time and across scientific disciplines. It follows a much richer pattern. Our results
support the Kuhnian theory of knowledge creation through scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts [39]
and falsify the primary assumptions of the economic paradigm of endogenous growth.

13
 500

400
Flow of Ideas index (Iflow)

300

200

100

0
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

all sciences, Continent, p=2% all sciences, UK, p=2%

all sciences, US, p=2% all sciences, all regions, p=2%

1.80

1.50
Research Productivity index (Iprod)

1.20

0.90

0.60

0.30

0.00
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

all sciences, Continent, p=2% all sciences, UK, p=2%

all sciences, US, p=2% all sciences, all regions, p=2%

Figure 4: Flow of Ideas (top) and Research Productivity (bottom) indices for all sciences in different regions,
corrected with the factor 𝐶(𝑇) (equation (A3)) for time bias with a yearly probability p of recognition equal
to 2%. Notice the clear pattern of the three industrial revolutions in the Research Productivity of the UK.

14
 300

250
Flow of Ideas index (Iflow)

200

150

100

50

0
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

physical sciences, Continent, p=2% physical sciences, UK, p=2%

physical sciences, US, p=2% physical sciences, all regions, p=2%

1.20

1.00
Research Productivity index (Iprod)

0.80

0.60

0.40

0.20

0.00
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

physical sciences, Continent, p=2% physical sciences, UK, p=2%

physical sciences, US, p=2% physical sciences, all regions, p=2%

Figure 5: Flow of Ideas (top) and Research Productivity (bottom) indices for the physical sciences in different
regions corrected with the factor 𝐶(𝑇) (equation (A3)) for time bias with a yearly probability p of recognition
equal to 2%. Notice the clear pattern of the three industrial revolutions in the Research Productivity of the
UK.

15
 200

150
Flow of Ideas index (Iflow)

100

50

0
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

life sciences, Continent, p=2% life sciences, UK, p=2%

life sciences, US, p=2% life sciences, all regions, p=2%

1.00

0.80
Research Productivity index (Iprod)

0.60

0.40

0.20

0.00
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

life sciences, Continent, p=2% life sciences, UK, p=2%

life sciences, US, p=2% life sciences, all regions, p=2%

Figure 6: Flow of Ideas (top) and Research Productivity (bottom) indices for the life sciences in different
regions corrected with the factor 𝐶(𝑇) (equation (A3)) for time bias with a yearly probability p of recognition
equal to 2%.

16
 500

400
Flow of Ideas index (Iflow)

300

200

100

0
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
physical sciences, all regions, p=2%
life sciences, p=2%
all sciences, all regions, p=2%

1.20

1.00
Research Productivity index (Iprod)

0.80

0.60

0.40

0.20

0.00
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

physical sciences, all regions, p=2%

life sciences, p=2%
all sciences, all regions, p=2%

Figure 7: Flow of Ideas (top) and Research Productivity (bottom) indices for the life, physical and all sciences
in all regions corrected with the factor 𝐶(𝑇) (equation (A3)) for time bias with a yearly probability p of
recognition equal to 2%.

17
5.2 Statistical significance

In the previous section, we graphically demonstrated, in figures 2-7, that knowledge is not homogeneously
distributed in space or time and across scientific disciplines. We concluded that it follows a rich pattern, much
more in line with the punctuated equilibrium process, underlying the Kuhnian theory of scientific revolutions,
than with the continuous process, underlying the endogenous growth theory. In this section, we will support
this statement by calculating levels of statistical significance.

We use the 10,000 synthetic time series obtained from the simulations presented in Appendix A (and figure
A4) to test the null hypothesis that research productivity is constant. As explained in Appendix A, the
simulations were done using the specific features of the Encyclopaedia dataset. The reason for this is that
the Chronology and the Encyclopaedia have different end times (1988 and 2007 respectively). To compare
simulations with the empirical data, we cannot mix them up, and thus have to choose one of them. The
Encyclopaedia has almost 20 years of more recent data, which is also very relevant in this statistical
significance exercise.

1.60

1.40
Research Productivity index (Iprod)

1.20

1.00

0.80

0.60

0.40

0.20

0.00
1810 1860 1910 1960 2010
Research Productivity index, all regions, all sciences
Synthetic index (Percentile 0.1%)
Synthetic index (Percentile 1%)
Synthetic index (Percentile 50%)
Synthetic index (Percentile 99%)
Synthetic index (Percentile 99.9%)

Figure 8: Research Productivity index calculated on the Encyclopaedia dataset, without time bias correction,
for all sciences in all regions (red line), compared with different percentiles calculated from a simulation of
10,000 synthetic time series also without corrections.

18
Figure 8 shows the Research Productivity index, together with the different percentiles calculated from this
simulation. To make a correct comparison possible, the index (red line) is not corrected for time bias and is
normalized so that the average value over the time period from 1775 until 2007 equals to 1. The same is
done for the percentiles, they are normalized so that the average value of the median is equal to 1 over that
same time period. Because no time bias correction is applied, the percentile curves dip down as more and
more protagonists are missed in the later years.

Up to the 1920s, the index behaves as expected from the simulations and lies at almost all times within the
two 99% percentile lines. Then a first anomaly occurs, with a huge increase in research productivity between
1930 and 1960, characterised by a peak much higher than the 99.9% percentile. Notice that this peak
corresponds to an absolute increase of almost 50% above the average value, notwithstanding the downward
trending time bias that becomes quite significant in the simulations (about -20% at the time of the peak).
Then the second anomaly is the plunge below the 0.1% percentile occurring in the later decades.

6. Discussion

6.1 Science and technology (S&T) measurements

It is important to put our results in perspective and compare with other existing attempts to measure science
and technology progress. The monitoring of science and technology is a relatively new activity that started,
less than a century ago, in the interwar period. At that time, the awareness grew that industrial laboratories
and government scientific activities needed to be managed more effectively, based on statistical measures,
particularly in case they needed to be mobilized for war. According to Godin [40], S&T statistics16 were
originally an Anglo-Saxon17 phenomenon. This changed in the early 1960s, when the OECD became strongly
involved and standardized procedures were designed. When international comparisons of S&T progress
between countries became possible, the measurements and availability of these statistics spread globally.
The main problem, however, is the fact that the OECD standardized the methodology exclusively from an
economic (growth) perspective. A case in point is the fact that the principal aggregate statistic to describe a
country’s R&D activities, and the primary indicator for international comparisons, is the so-called GERD, the
gross domestic expenditure on R&D (see OECD’s Frascati manual [41]). As this measures the sum of R&D
expenditures for different economic sectors, it does not give any information on the accumulation of
knowledge, the flow of ideas or the productivity of research.

Less economically and more technologically oriented approaches can be found in a few very specific niches
where direct measurements are possible. These generally show either the increase in performance of a new
technology, or its penetration in a certain country or region. Well-known examples are microprocessor clock
speed, computer processing efficiency or the number of floating-point operations carried out per second
(FLOPS) by the largest supercomputer in any given year (for an overview, see Roser and Ritchie [42]). Often,
some mathematical expression can be deduced, for example the exponential increase of the number of
transistors per microprocessor, which doubles on average every two years (Moore’s law). Or, the typical
logistic process underlying the adoption of a new technology in a certain country or region (for an overview,
see Ritchie [43]). These measures only give information on how fast the increase in performance is for a
certain technology and how virally (or not) it spreads through society. They do not tell us anything on the
accumulation of knowledge in a certain discipline or region through the process of discovery and invention.

After reviewing the published literature, only one piece of research came out that is similar in scope and
approach to our study. In a 2005 paper, published in the Journal of Technological Forecasting & Social
Change, Huebner [44] presents a dataset and a methodology that can be used to measure the scientific

16
In line with Godin [40], we use the term S&T statistics, referring to Science and Technology statistics.
17
More specifically the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom

19
progress over the past 500 years. He defines the “rate of innovation” as “the number of important
technological developments per year divided by the world population”. The source he used was “The History
of Science and Technology” by Bunch and Hellemans [45], which covers the period between 1455 and 1999.
After fitting a model to the data, Huebner came to the conclusion that the rate of innovation peaked around
1873 and has started to decline rapidly afterwards. Additionally, the model, which was calibrated in 2005,
projected that 90% of the economic limit of technology18 would be reached in 2018 and 95% in 2038.
Huebner projects the decline, since 1873, much earlier than our research, which puts it in the 1970s for the
Flow of Ideas and the 1950s for the Research Productivity. Additionally, there is no sign of any industrial and
technological revolutions in Huebner’s data, there is only one wave up, cusping around 1873, followed by a
continuous and more rapid decline ever since.

The discrepancies between our results and Huebner’s are caused by some large differences in methodology.
First of all, Huebner counts the number of important new technologies per year, whereas, in the current
study, we first link technologies to protagonists and then calculate how many of them are professionally
active in a particular year. In section 2.3, we explained why the use of protagonists gives a far better proxy
for the Flow of Ideas, than artificially linking each discovery and invention to one singular year. Second, it is
very important to stress that, in his calculations, Huebner does not correct for time bias. As such, he does
not recognize that many recent discoveries are not acknowledged yet, and that the longer back in time
discoveries were made, the more likely it is that they will be recognized as such. Additionally, as Smart
pointed out [46], Huebner does all the calculations at the world aggregated level. This may be problematic
because in this way innovations, which primarily happened in the advanced world, are normalized by a
population growth that to a larger degree took place in the developing world. In our study, we normalize the
Flow of Ideas by the population of the corresponding regions, treating the European Continent, the United
Kingdom and the United States as separate entities. And, the final difference is that Huebner uses only one
data source (Bunch and Hellemans [45]), whereas we use two different sources (the Encyclopaedia and the
Chronology).

We propose that the indices for the Flow of Ideas and the Research Productivity, which we present here for
the first time, provide a substantial contribution to the research field of S&T measurement. Our indices really
focus on knowledge accumulation, in a specific region and scientific discipline, and take a much broader
perspective than the purely economic indicators used in the internationally standardized reports on R&D
activities, as pioneered by the OECD. They provide a complete overview of discovery and invention in a
specific region and discipline and avoid myopically focusing on the increase in performance for a specific
niche technology. And, finally, our methodology is robust, using protagonists instead of discoveries, a time-
bias correction, appropriate aggregation levels, and multiple data sources. To our knowledge, the current
research is the first to define and measure technological progress directly in different scientific disciplines
and geographical areas, covering the time span since the first industrial revolution. It is also the first, to our
knowledge, to quantitatively demonstrate the occurrence of the industrial and technological revolutions so
clearly with robust quantitative indicators.

6.2 Caveats

In a review article on Huebner [44], Smart [46] discusses a few specific issues that may make the
measurement of innovation particularly hard. First, one has to make the distinction between human-
generated and technology-generated innovation. Even if we would observe a decrease in human-initiated
innovation per capita, one would also “need to carefully measure all the work being done by our increasingly

18
According to Huebner [44], there are two different technological limits. “The first limit is a physical one, due to
the laws of physics, such as the impossibility of building a perpetual motion machine. The second limit is
economic; it is physically possible to dig a canal from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean across the
continental United States, but it is not economically feasible.”

20
clever and subtle machines”, in order to get the full picture of innovation dynamics. Next, innovation may
occur increasingly “… ‘under the hood’ of the engine of change, below our threshold of easy perception”.
Finally, as the world develops, and we all climb higher on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we may be pursuing
innovation on more “abstract, virtual, and difficult-to-quantify levels, like social interaction, status,
entertainment, and self-esteem”.

Smart concludes [46]: “In short, there are a number of opportunities for us to improve our innovation
measures in coming years, to reflect possible saturations in human-initiated vs. technology-initiated
innovation, in human awareness of innovation, and in human physical and psychological needs, as well as
the increasingly abstract, higher-order, and incremental nature of innovation in today's ever more virtual
and human-surpassing digital environment.”

In this analysis, Smart does not separate innovation from invention and discovery. As his criticism may surely
hold for the more exploitative innovation process, where increments may be only gradual, difficult to observe
or “under the hood”, this will be much less so for the creative invention and explorative discovery processes,
which, using Kauffman’s terminology, are much more “collectively autocatalytic” [34]. As we explained
before, not all new ideas have the same impact. The knowledge indices that are presented in the present
paper have been specifically designed to capture more disruptive events, to use Thiel’s terminology [35],
those ideas that may bring us from “zero to one”.

A final caveat that was not discussed by Smart is the possibility that scientific advance, over the last half
century, has been, more than before, the result of larger teams of hundreds or even thousands of scientists
and as such has become more difficult to link to single protagonists. Such events would be missing from our
statistics. Maybe that could explain the decline in Research Productivity that we see, for example since the
1960s, according to the index in figure 8. Beyond the final observation of our indices, which is the year 1988,
this could have gained further momentum because of improved communication and cooperation through
the blossoming of the digital era and network effects. In response to this possible criticism, we argue that
large scale projects are not a new phenomenon, mostly characterising the modern, digital internet-based
world. Humans have always been able to cooperate on a grand scale from the building of the great pyramids,
cathedrals, sea canals, railroad networks, up to the Human Genome Project. Moreover, every project, no
matter how big, had its great visionaries, initiators and leaders, namely its protagonists. Take for example
Filippo Brunelleschi who engineered the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral of Florence, or Robert
Oppenheimer who, as wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory is called the “father of the atomic bomb”,
Werner von Braun, who has been linked to the Apollo Project, or Englert and Higgs, who received the 2013
Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the Higgs Boson even though this was a massive joint effort of
thousands of scientists working at the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

7. What caused the decline, and what to do about it?

The index series that we constructed allow us to study the historical evolution of the Flow of Ideas and the
Research Productivity since the first industrial revolution, in different countries and scientific disciplines. It
can be clearly observed that knowledge accumulation is not constant but follows the big waves of the
industrial and technological revolutions. Strikingly, over the past decades, regardless what measure is used,
knowledge accumulation has been in steady decline across all sectors and regions. Another interesting
finding is the divergence between geographical areas. Research Productivity has seen a steep rise in the
United Kingdom and the United States between 1900 and 1950, whereas during that same period, it has
dropped off strongly in the European Continent. What may be the underlying drivers of these observations?
In the following, we examine several possible explanations.

21
7.1 The” end of science”

The most obvious place to start looking for answers is by digging deeper into the nature of the scientific
enterprise itself. Horgan [22] starts his own investigation by asking whether our theories of the cosmos will
seem as wrong to our descendants as Aristotle’s theories seem to us. The answer, he exclaims, is clearly “…
”No,” because Aristotle’s theories were wrong, and our theories are right. The earth orbits the sun, not vice
versa, and our world is made not of earth, water, fire and air but of hydrogen, carbon and other elements”.
Over the past few hundred years, researchers have “mapped out physical reality, ranging from the micro-
realm of quarks and electrons to the macro-realm of planets, stars, and galaxies”. Of course, our descendants
will learn much new things about nature, but “most new knowledge will merely extend and fill in our current
maps of reality rather than forcing radical revisions”. As a consequence of its past successes, scientific
discovery follows a process of diminishing returns. This is what Horgan refers to as “the end of science”.

Interestingly, in their quest to find the “theory of everything”, theoretical physicists and mathematicians
seem so obsessed to come up with the keystone that finally closes the scientific endeavour, that they are
willing to break with centuries of philosophical tradition of “defining scientific knowledge as empirical” [47].
According to Ellis and Silk [47], the problem with many of the tools used in this process is that they “invoke
imperceptible domains”, which makes them unfalsifiable-by-design. For example, in string theory, the
“higher dimensions are wound so tightly that they are too small to observe at energies accessible through
collisions in any practicable future particle detector…”. Multiverse theory, then again, claims that there are
billions of unobservable sister universes out there. To deal with this, some researchers are calling for a
change in how theoretical physics should be done. In their opinion, “if a theory is sufficiently elegant and
explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally”.

Ironically, this evolution contradicts Horgan’s “end of science”, because it may make our theories “wrong”
again, or more Ptolemaic, which would mean the end to the diminishing returns hypothesis. Clearly, there
are some other serious drawbacks. First of all, as Stent [21] and Horgan [22] point out, untestable hypotheses
do not have the potential to generate powerful new technologies, since un-testability implies lack of
measurable consequences and thus no impact in the physical world that is within our reach. Moreover, when
physics becomes impractical as well as incomprehensible, society may withdraw its support. Secondly,
according to Freeman Dyson [48], too much emphasis on reductionism kills creativity and makes science
sterile: “If we try to squeeze science into a single philosophical viewpoint such as reductionism, we are like
Procrustes chopping off the feet of his guests when they do not fit onto his bed. Science flourishes best when
it uses freely all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions of what science ought to be. Every
time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s
imagination is richer than ours.”

7.2 The ”zero risk society”

Based on the new series of indices we constructed, it can be concluded that, over the past decades, mankind
has been going through a period of technological stagnation. The fact that this feels counter-intuitively,
especially to the J-curve proponents, is because we have been confusing technological advance with
innovation, without realizing that knowledge accumulation follows a very subtle path, that first and foremost
needs discovery and invention. A healthy economic system strikes the right balance between these three
fundamental drivers of technological progress: the efficiency of the low-risk, mostly incremental, exploitative
innovation, the serendipity of the medium-risk creative invention, and the boldness of the high-risk
explorative discovery.

This extreme focus on exploitation (innovation) in disregard of creativity (invention) and exploration
(discovery) is caused by the fact that affluent society has become extremely risk averse; we refer to this as
the zero-risk society [49]. Five deeper causes have brought us to this point. First of all, it is the direct

22
consequence of economic progress itself. When wealth and age in society increases, people become ever
more risk averse, focus on going concern, protection of existing wealth and rent seeking. This, however,
mainly applies to the well-to-do, which brings us to our second cause. To be able to take risks, it is necessary
to be empowered and have access to opportunity. As inequality has been soaring in recent decades, a
growing proportion of citizens struggle to get through their daily lives, suffer poor health, have no access to
high-quality education or a decent social security safety net. Thus, they already experience risky lives, but
here only with downside risks as opposed to the upside risks associated with entrepreneurship. Third,
technological advance creates an “illusion of control”. We have the cosy feeling of being protected and
secure and that technology will save us from any harm or adverse events. Fourth, this is all amplified by
herding and imitation through social media, where, fifth, often, over-reaction occurs, which leads to a
management by extremes.

The consequence of this could not be better described than by Peter Thiel [35], who writes that “big plans
for the future have become archaic curiosities”: instead of working for years to build new products, we
rearrange already-invented ones. “Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already
existing companies. Lawyers resolve disputes over old things or help other people structure their affairs. And
private equity investors and management consultants don’t start new businesses; they squeeze extra
efficiency from old ones with incessant procedural optimizations.”

7.3 The ”Fool’s Gold Age”

Since the 1970s, society has believed that wealth can be created out-of-nothing in the financial system,
rather than through real productivity gains from knowledge accumulation, creativity, better management,
the implementation of more efficient processes or improved designs. We call this “the Illusion of the
Perpetual Money Machine” [15], which can be understood by taking a long-term perspective of 150 years of
economic history. In this synthesis, three distinctive waves of growth can be observed [16]. The first came
with the modernization of the means of production, and the supply side of the economy during the second
industrial revolution, also called the technological revolution. This led to large-scale industrialization and the
building of new infrastructure in the period between 1870 and 1910, which we call the “Gilded Age”. In a
second wave, growth was propelled by a new consumer society in the Western world. The “modern” lifestyle
that came with this cultural transformation created an entirely new demand for consumer goods like
electrical apparel, automobiles or entertainment services. This was the “Golden Age”, between the end of
WWII and 1970. The third wave, which is still ongoing, is completely different. Unlike the previous two, which
were strongly rooted in the real economy, the first through the supply side, the second through the demand
side, the current third wave is supported by financialization. As the zero-risk society essentially stopped
looking for the unexpected through creativity and exploration, it has to look elsewhere to find “growth”. That
is why it has fooled itself into believing that wealth can be created out-of-nothing, from ever-rising financial
debt, ever-decreasing savings and wealth extracted from the profits on financial assets and house prices. We
call the current age the “Fool’s Gold Age”.

7.4 Escape from the zero-risk society

Paradoxically, in order to make our society more resilient, we contend that we need to be open for
exploration, and be willing, but also create opportunities for people, to take unknown risks. As a matter of
fact, this is also the only way to get out of the trap of diminishing returns and escape from the “equilibrium”
of economic and technological stagnation. This is comparable to the military tactic of reconnaissance. Indeed,
you put smaller groups of scouts at a higher risk, but the exploration outside the area occupied by friendly
forces is at the benefit of the larger group and increases its resilience.

23
We need “to make risk-taking great again”. For the haves, we must promote a culture in education where
failure is seen as part of the learning process. For the have-nots, we need to create a society that gives much
greater access for everyone to opportunity, health, education and especially empowerment. Let us
aggressively fund explorative, high-risk projects, encourage playful, creative, even apparently useless
tinkering [50], that will surely foster serendipity [51] in research on the longer term. Of course, targeted
research is extremely useful, and efficiency is necessary, but we need to understand that most often this, at
best, only leads to innovation. To stimulate discovery and invention, which are the parents of innovations,
untargeted free exploration, driven by curiosity, as well as by economic and social rewards, depending on
the individual or group, is key. And finally, we need different role models for our youth. Why not promote
the risk-taker, the explorer, the creative inventor as a new type of social influencer acclaimed like a
Hollywood or sports star? Only by such a deep cultural change, by bringing back the frontier spirit and making
risk-taking great again will we be able to escape from the illusionary and paralyzing zero-risk society and deal
with the massive lurking risks that it produces.

8. Conclusions

Using two different data sources, which we referred to as the Encyclopaedia and the Chronology, we
constructed a series of indices to quantitatively study the historical evolution of fundamental scientific
knowledge between 1750 and 1988. The first series, called the Flow of Ideas indices, give the number of
protagonists (great discoverers and inventors), from different scientific disciplines and geographical areas,
who are active in their professional career, for each year. The second, called the Research Productivity indices
give the per capita (per million) result of the first series.

The indices are diverse in geography, covering: 1) the European Continent, being, Germany, France,
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden; 2) the United Kingdom; and, 3) the United States. As to
research fields, the two broad classifications of the life and physical sciences were followed.

From this new set of historical data on scientific knowledge, we find highly statistically significant evidence
that knowledge is not homogeneously distributed in space or time and across scientific disciplines. In time,
a rich pattern of waves has been observed, coinciding with the industrial and technological revolutions and
scientific paradigm shifts. Moreover, a consistent decline is observed across the board since the early 1970s,
both for the ‘Flow of Ideas’ and the ‘Research Productivity’. In space, the UK has been superior across all
scientific disciplines until right after the second world war. Figure 4 demonstrates how the UK has been the
major participant in the three industrial revolutions. Up to the 1900s, the European Continent was its main
challenger; after that, it was the US. It is eye-opening to see the Continent’s steady decline since the 1900s
contrasted by the US overtaking the UK after the second world war. Across scientific disciplines, the biggest
increase in Research Productivity occurs in the physical sciences between 1750 and 1820 (the period of the
industrial revolution) and in the life sciences between 1920 and 1950.

Since 1970, all disciplines are in decline across all geographical regions. It is striking that the digital revolution,
coinciding with the so-called industry 4.0 is absolutely absent in this dataset. This suggests that this is mainly
driven by innovation and exploitation of existing knowledge, and not by discovery and invention, or new
explorations.

We encourage our fellow scientists to challenge, contribute and create new datasets, so that we can push
this research domain forward, and improve our understanding of idea generation and its impact on the
future.

24
References

[1] P. Turchin, T.E. Currie, H. Whitehouse et al., Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension
of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 115(2),
E144-E151 (2018), DOI:10.1073/pnas.1708800115

[2] C. Diebolt and M. Haupert, editors, Handbook of Cliometrics, Springer, Heidelberg New York Dordrecht
London (2016)

[3] T. Devezas and G. Modelski, Power law behavior and world system evolution: A millennial learning
process, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 70, 819–859 (2003)

[4] D. Sornette, Why Stock Markets Crash, Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems, Princeton
University Press (2017)

[5] L. Nottale, J. Chaline and P. Grou, Les Arbres de l’évolution, Hachette Litterature (2000)

[6] D. Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, A Story of Economic Discovery, W. W. Norton &
Company (2006)

[7] U.S. Congress, Energy Reorganization Act of 1973: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, First Session, on H.R.
11510 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), p. 248

[8] D.H. Meadows, D.L. Meadows, J. Randers and W.W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth, Potomac
Associates – Universe Books (1972)

[9] K. Raworth, Doughnut Economics, Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Random House
Business Books (2017)

[10] W. Steffen, K. Richardson, J. Rockström et al., Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a
changing planet, Science 347 (6223), 1259855 (13 Feb 2015), DOI:10.1126/science.1259855

[11] J. Rockström, W. Steffen, K. Noone et al., A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, 472–475
(2009), DOI: 10.1038/461472a

[12] W.E. Rees, Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: what urban economics leaves out,
Environment & Urbanization 4 (2), 121–130 (1992), DOI:10.1177/095624789200400212

[13] R. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Princeton University Press, 2016

[14] T. Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got
Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, Penguin Group (2011)

[15] D. Sornette and P. Cauwels, 1980-2008: The illusion of the perpetual money machine and what it
bodes for the future, Risks 2 (2), 103-131 (2014), DOI:10.3390/risks2020103 (ISSN 2227-9091, MDPI, Basel)

[16] D. Sornette and P. Cauwels, The illusion of the perpetual money machine and what it bodes for the
future (tentative title), book in preparation (2020)

[17] A. Reckwitz, The invention of creativity: modern society and the culture of the new, (First published in
German as Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung, Suhrkamp Verlag,
(2012)), translated by S. Black; English edition, Polity Press (2017)

[18] Charles I. Jones, Paul Romer: Ideas, Nonrivalry, and Endogenous Growth, Scand. J. of Economics
121(3), 859-883 (2019), DOI: 10.1111/sjoe.12370

[19] R. Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, Viking (2005)

25
[20] An Ecomodernist Manifesto, http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english

[21] G.S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age: a view of the end of progress, The Natural History Press,
(1969)

[22] J. Horgan, The End of Science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age, Basic
Books (2015)

[23] T. Modis, Forecasting the growth of complexity and change, Technological Forecasting and Social
Change 69, 377–404 (2002)

[24] R. Douthat, The Decadent Society. How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, Avid Reader
Press (2020)

[25] R. Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 7 (2001),
https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

[26] A. Johansen and D. Sornette, Finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the world population and
economic indices, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 294 (3-4), 465-502 (2001)

[27] A.D. Hüsler and D. Sornette, Human population and atmospheric carbon dioxide growth dynamics:
diagnostics for the future, Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 223, 2065–2085 (2014)

[28] D. Sornette and P. Cauwels, Financial Bubbles: Mechanisms and Diagnostics, Review of Behavioral
Economics 2 (3), 279-305 (2015), DOI:10.1561/105.00000035

[29] W.J. Ripple, C. Wolf, T.M. Newsome et al., World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,
BioScience 70 (1), 8–12 (2020), DOI:10.1093/biosci/biz088

[30] L. Bretschger, Greening Economy, Graying Society, CER-ETH Press, Center of Economic Research at
ETH Zurich (2018)

[31] V. Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact,
Oxford University Press (2005)

[32] N. Bloom, C.I. Jones, J. Van Reenen, M. Webb, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?, American Economic
Review 110 (4), 1104-1144 (2020)

[33] S. Lera and D. Sornette, Evidence of a bimodal US GDP growth rate distribution: A wavelet approach,
Quantitative Finance and Economics 1(1), 26-43 (2017)

[34] S. Kauffman, S. Thurner and R. Hanel, The Evolving Web of Future Wealth, Scientific American,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-evolving-web-of-future-wealth/ May 9 (2008)

[35] P. Thiel and B. Masters, Zero to One, Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Virgin Books
(2014)

[36] R.E. Krebs, Encyclopedia of Scientific Principles, Laws, and Theories, Greenwood Press (2008)

[37] I. Asimov, Asimov’s Chronology of Science and Discovery, Harper & Row publishers (1989)

[38] J. Bolt, R. Inklaar, H. de Jong and J. Luiten van Zanden, Rebasing Maddison: new income comparisons
and the shape of long-run economic development, Maddison Project Working paper 10, 2018. Online
resource: https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-
2018

[39] T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press (1962)

26
[40] B. Godin, Measurement and Statistics on Science and Technology, 1920 to the present, Routledge
studies in the history of science, technology and medicine (2005)

[41] OECD, Frascati Manual 2015: Guidelines for Collecting and Reporting Data on Research and
Experimental Development, The Measurement of Scientific, Technological and Innovation Activities, OECD
Publishing, Paris (2015), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264239012-en

[42] M. Roser and H. Ritchie, Technological Progress. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved
from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress' (2013) [Online Resource]

[43] H. Ritchie, Technology Adoption. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from:

'https://ourworldindata.org/technology-adoption' (2017) [Online Resource]

[44] J. Huebner, A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation 72, 980-986 (2005)

[45] B. Bunch and A. Hellemans, The History of Science and Technology, Houghton Mifflin Co., New York
(2004).

[46] J.M. Smart, Measuring Innovation in an Accelerating World: Review of "A Possible Declining Trend for
Worldwide Innovation," Jonathan Huebner, Technological Forecasting & Social Change 72(8), 988-995
(2005). Online resource: https://www.accelerating.org/articles/huebnerinnovation

[47] G. Ellis and J. Silk, Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics, Nature 516, 321–323 (18
December 2014) doi:10.1038/516321a

[48] F. Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel, New York Review Books, 2008

[49] D. Sornette and P. Cauwels, Trapped in the “zero risk” society and how to break free, SSRN, 2020
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3684550

[50] K.O. Stanley and J. Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, The Myth of the Objective, Springer
International Publishing Switzerland, 2015, DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-15524-1

[51] O. Yaqub, Serendipity: Towards a taxonomy and a theory, Research Policy 47, 169-179 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.10.007

Peter Cauwels is a physicist by training and has been associated, as Senior Researcher, with the Chair of
Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH Zurich since 2011. Before that he worked in the banking industry where he took
up multiple senior management roles in research, risk – and portfolio management. Over the past decade,
he has been an advisor and board member of different technological start-ups and investment companies.

Didier Sornette is Professor of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH Zurich since 2006, special professor at the
Institute of Innovative Research of Tokyo Tech, and since 2019 dean of the Institute of Risk Analysis,
Prediction and Management, at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen. In
his research, he uses rigorous data-driven mathematical statistical analyses combined with nonlinear multi-
variable dynamical models with positive and negative feedbacks to study the predictability and control of
crises and extreme events in complex systems, with applications to all domains of science and practice.

27
Appendix A: Correction for the temporal bias

A.1 Modelling the temporal bias

To correct the temporal bias explained in section 4, we need to model it in a robust and realistic way. We
assume a simple scientific knowledge creation process based on the following assumptions:

• The career of a scientific protagonist starts at the age of 25 and ends at 75. Each protagonist survives
at least until the age of 75 and has a full career of 50 years.
• One protagonist, of age 25, is added, and one, of age 75, is removed from the scientific community
every year.
• This process reaches a steady state with a constant population. Every year, there are on average 50
exceptional scientists alive, uniformly distributed between 25 and 75 years old. If we apply the index
construction methodology to this population, we know that, by construction, the statistical average
of each instance of the index will be 50.
• We have to take into consideration the statistical uncertainty that comes with the process of
‘recognition’. We model this in a Bernoulli framework. Every year, a random trial is done with two
possible outcomes: ‘success’ if the protagonist is recognized, ‘failure’ if the protagonist is left in
oblivion for another year. ‘Success’ occurs with probability p and ‘failure’ with probability 1-p.
• The first year of the career, at the age of 25, coincides with the first Bernoulli trial.
• The last observation in each of the two datasets, the year Tend19, corresponds to the final Bernoulli
trial. If the career of a protagonist starts at year T, and if Tend -T consecutive failures occur, then the
researcher will never be ‘recognized’.
• The protagonists have a fair chance to be ‘recognized’ during their 50 years career. Therefore, we
take the probability p of success in each individual trial of the Bernoulli process to be equal to 1/50,
or 2%20. Other values of p are also considered below.

If we calculate a historical index of fundamental scientific knowledge, based on the process described above,
we know that, by construction, its ‘true’ value will fluctuate around 50. However, as a consequence of the
Bernoulli ‘recognition’ process that we defined above, the ‘observed’ value of this synthetic index will be
different. The time bias correction will be this exact ratio between the ‘true’ and the ‘observed’ value at
different times T between 1750 and Tend. This ratio will allow us to correct the ‘observed’ into the ‘true’
values.

To calculate the ‘observed’ values of the synthetic index, we must first calculate the probability that any
protagonist, beginning her career after 1750, will be ‘recognized’ before the year Tend.

For every new protagonist turning 25 at a time T between 1750 and Tend, there will be Tend -T opportunities
to be ‘recognized’21:

• When the first success is in Tend, after (Tend – T) failures, with probability p(1-p)Tend - T
• …
• When the first success is in (Tend - i) after (Tend - i – T) failures, with probability p(1-p)Tend – i - T;
• …
• When the first success is at time T after 0 failures, with probability p.

19
The last observation in the Chronology was 1988 and in the Encyclopedia it was 2007.
20
In this case, there is a 64% chance (1-(1-p)50 = 1 – 0.9850), that the protagonists will be recognized during their
career.
21
Obviously, this ‘recognition’ may also take place after the end of the career, or after death.

28
The total sum of all these yearly chances gives the probability that protagonists, who started their
professional career at year T, will be ‘recognized’ before the year Tend. Mathematically, this total sum is
equivalent to the Cumulative Negative Binomial Distribution function:

(k, r; p) = 1 − 𝐼! (𝑘 + 1, 𝑟) (A1)

where 𝐼" (𝑎, 𝑏) is the regularised incomplete Gamma function, with the following parameters:

• Number of successive failures: k = Tend -T

• Number of successes (after k failures): r = 1
• Probability of success in each trial: p = 2%

Figure A1 shows the probability that protagonists, starting their career at time T (on the x-axis), will never be
‘recognized’ (dashed line). The year 2007 was used as Tend, which applies to the Encyclopaedia. For scientists
who started their career in 1750, with an annual probability of p=2% of being ‘recognized’, they have an
almost 0% probability of still being ‘overlooked’ in 2007. On the other hand, for those starting in 2000, this
probability is over 90%.

To calculate the ‘observed’ values of the synthetic index from this, one more step must be taken. In the
simplified scientific knowledge creation process we defined earlier, we have each year, on average, 50
exceptional scientists alive, uniformly distributed between 25 and 75 years old. Because of the delayed
recognition process, each of those has a different probability of being recognized. The 50 protagonists that
are professionally active at time T started their careers uniformly between time T and T-50. Thus, the
observable value of the index 𝐼#$%& (𝑇; 𝑝, 𝑟) of Flow of Ideas at time T is the sum of terms (A1), from T-50 to
T, of the probabilities of being ‘recognized’ (the solid black line in figure A2):
*
𝐼#$%& (𝑇; 𝑝, 𝑟) = 2+,*-./ 31 − 𝐼! (𝑇'() − 𝑗 + 1, 𝑟)5 (A2)

with r=1 and p=2% in our example and 𝐼" (𝑎, 𝑏) is the regularised incomplete Gamma function.

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000
Start of career (Age of 25)

% chance that protagonist is 'recognized' in 2007

% chance that protagonist is 'overlooked' in 2007

Figure A1: Probability given by equation (A1) that protagonists, starting their professional career in year T (x-
axis), get recognized (solid black) or overlooked (dashed grey) before Tend (in this case 2007). At every time
T, the black line gives the result of the Cumulative Negative Binomial Distribution function for Tend -T
consecutive failures, 1 consecutive success, and a probability of success in each trial of 2%.

29
 50 2.5

45

40

35
2.0
30

25

20
1.5
15

10

0 1.0
1750 1800 1850 1900 1950 2000

'Observed' value of synthetic index Time bias correction factor

Figure A2: The observable value of the index 𝐼#$%& (𝑇; 𝑝, 𝑟) given by equation (A2) of Flow of Ideas
constructed from a simple scientific knowledge creation process (solid black line, left-hand scale), for p=2%
and r=1. The dashed line (right-hand scale) is the time bias correction factor 𝐶(𝑇), defined as the ratio
between the ‘true’ (at a constant average value of 50) and the observable value (see equation (A3)).

Figure A2 shows the observable number (solid black line) of recognised protagonists (index of Flow of Ideas)
as a function of time, in a population where the true number is 50. Due to the time bias, the index gradually
decays from 50 in 1750 down to about 20 in 2007. From the black line in figure A2, to be read on the left-
hand scale, the time bias correction factor C(T) can be calculated as the correction to apply to the observable
index to recover the true value. It is therefore the ratio of the ‘true’ and the ‘observed’ value:
./
𝐶(𝑇) = 0!"#$ (*; !,5)
with r=1 and p=2%. (A3)

A.2 Numerical simulations to check the performance of the correction factor

We set up a simulation22 to test the validity of this time bias correction factor, using the specific features of
the Encyclopaedia dataset. This means that the start date is taken to be 1700, the end date 2007, and each
random set of the simulation contains 495 recognized protagonists, which is the exact number found in the
Encyclopaedia, as reported in Table 2.

First, we introduce a procedure that generates a random set of 495 recognized protagonists, as follows:

• We begin by initiating one single protagonist by random picking a year of birth (Tbirth) between 1700
and 2007.
• As the career starts at Tbirth + 25 years, we perform (Tend - Tbirth – 25) independent single Bernoulli
trials with a probability of success p of 2% for this protagonist.
• If any of these Bernoulli trials is positive, the protagonist is marked as being recognized.
• This process is repeated until 495 protagonists are recognized.

22
All calculations are done using the Python programming language (https://www.python.org/)

30
 • Then, the index construction methodology is applied to this set of 495 protagonists. That is, for every
year between 1750 and 2007, the number of protagonists that are professionally active is counted,
assuming that all of them live until 75 or beyond.
• This resulting index of Flow of ideas is the output of the first procedure.

This procedure is repeated 10,000 times, yielding 10,000 random realisations for the index of Flow of Ideas,
each with values between the year 1700 and 208223. The median of this set can be used to check how the
time-bias correction factor 𝐶(𝑇) works for the years 1700 until 2010, as shown in figure A3. The linear ramp
expresses the obvious fact it takes 75 years for the population to reach equilibrium, by construction. Between
1700 and 1725, there are no protagonists that are professionally active as the first scientists in our simulation
are born in 1700, leading to a vanishing index in that period. Then, the value linearly increases until the
maximum value at steady state is reached in 1775. This is followed by a period of gradual decline as the
number of chances (trials) to be recognized in the Bernoulli process continuously decreases with the
diminishing number of years until 2007. The levels of this figure can be interpreted as follows. When
summing all the observable median index values shown in red between 1725 and 2082 and dividing this sum
by 50, we get 494 for this simulation. This is very close to the 495 observations in the actual Encyclopaedia
dataset. The black triangles in the figure give the values of this simulated index when corrected by the time-
bias correction factor 𝐶(𝑇) given by equation (A3), i.e., when the observable median index values shown in
red are multiplied by 𝐶(𝑇). One can observe the excellent performance of 𝐶(𝑇), which provides a perfect
correction, as it retrieves an index of Flow of Ideas that is constant by construction from 1775 until 2007.
120

100

80

60

40

20

0
1710 1760 1810 1860 1910 1960 2010
Discoverers (median value of simulation)
corrected discoverers (median value of simulation * time-bias correction factor)
Figure A3: Median index of Flow of Ideas obtained over 10,000 random realisations of 495 recognized
protagonists whose births are randomly distributed between 1700 and 2007. The red circles give, for each
year between 1725 and 2007, the observable median index of Flow of Ideas over the 10,000 simulations.
The black triangles show the corrected median index of Flow of Ideas obtained by multiplying the observed
value (red circles) by the correction factor 𝐶(𝑇) given by expression (A3).

23
This is when those protagonists born in 2007 reach the end of their career at the age of 75.

31
In addition, from the 10,000 simulations for each year, different percentiles can be calculated, which are
shown in figure A4, between 1810 and 2010. These are used in section 5.2 to assess whether the historical
evolution of the indices contains actual information or is more likely the result of pure randomness.

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0
1810 1860 1910 1960 2010
Percentile (0.1%) Percentile (1%) Percentile (5%)
Percentile (25%) Percentile (50%) Percentile (75%)
Percentile (95%) Percentile (99%) Percentile (99.9%)

Figure A4: Different percentiles of the 10,000 simulated indices of Flow of Ideas. These are used in the main
text to verify the statistical significance of our final results. The 50% percentile is the same as the series
represented by the red circles in figure A3.

32
 :

Swiss Finance Institute

Swiss Finance Institute (SFI) is the national center for fundamental
research, doctoral training, knowledge exchange, and continuing
education in the fields of banking and finance. SFI’s mission is to
grow knowledge capital for the Swiss financial marketplace. Created
in 2006 as a public–private partnership, SFI is a common initiative
of the Swiss finance industry, leading Swiss universities, and the
Swiss Confederation.

c/o University of Geneva, Bd. Du Pont d'Arve 42, CH-1211 Geneva 4

T +41 22 379 84 71, rps@sfi.ch, www.sfi.ch
1