Once again, I’m brooding over science’s limits. I recently posted Q&As with three physicists with strong opinions on the topic--David Deutsch, Marcelo Gleiser and Martin Rees--as well as this column: “Is Science Infinite?” Then in March I attended a two-day brainstorming session--which I’ll call “The Session”--with 20 or so science-y folks over whether science is slowing down and what we can do about it. The Session was inspired in part by research suggesting that scientific progress is stagnating. In “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, four economists claim that “a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms show[s] that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.” The economists are Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb of Stanford and John Van Reenen of MIT.

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