The portrayal of Scientists and scientific breakthroughs in sci-fi

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15 hours ago, ChrisSpace said:

Well, something I've noticed is that scientific breakthroughs are most often portrayed as being the work of just one inventor or scientist, rather than a large team or group of teams.

This problem is far from being confined to fiction. People want to put a face on a breakthrough. Usually, that face belongs to a distinguished scientist who was, pretty much, in charge of the whole project, but did more management than science. He gets Nobel prizes, statues and his name on the thing that was discovered, while the veritable army of postdocs, graduate students and undergrads who actually set up the experiments, analyzed data, wrote necessary programs and all that goes unnamed. Teams that make those discoveries can be gigantic, and that's before those who laid the foundations to that discovery are considered.

That said, theoretical breakthroughs are more likely to involve smaller groups. In mathematics and theoretical physics, you may find cases of a "lone scientist" coming up with a revolutionary new approach. This is mostly because those things, generally, don't need a huge team to come up with. Physics, in particular, tends to involve theoretical predictions being made long before they can actually be tested, and they are often found correct, which is far from the case in biology and chemistry, where experimenters still lead the way, and theories are invalidated more often than proven correct. Indeed, this is the reason why I switched from physics to biophysics. I like experimental work more than raw mathematics.

22 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

Not to totally derail the thread, but I am asking you.... what paperwork would you eliminate from work and government if you had the power?

I'd switch it over to computers, and have it "signed" with a biometric check (the government already has all your data, anyway, they just need your permission to use it). By that point, we're dead without computers anyway, so we may as well make our lives easier. I'm not a bureaucrat, so I won't name any specific stuff, but the process itself could be streamlined using modern technology. Some governments are actually working on that sort of thing, there's a whole ministry in my country dedicated to it. The system actually kind of works, though it's very poorly designed on the UI side, frustratingly slow, and you can't quite do everything with it. If you want your future government to rely on such a system, hopefully in a more functional form, it's quite plausible we'll get there eventually.

Of course, such a system has to be very secure, by necessity. One non-obvious privacy concern with giving up your data is not necessarily that big companies would do something bad with it (the current approach is to look for trends in the data as a whole), but that they get broken into, and your data may get leaked to people you did not agree to share it with. There's been enough big company data breaches to show that is a very real concern. A centralized computer system for handling citizen data would face similar concerns, and not only it would have to be secured against criminals, but also against foreign state actors, who will typically be better equipped, and may be even more malicious. Don't believe anyone who tells you cyberwarfare is the way of the future, though. It is the way of today. 

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The portrayal of Scientists and scientific breakthroughs in sci-fi

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