The end of vertical growth and the beginning of stamp collection

There is a saying that goes like this: We are the middle children of history — born too late to explore Earth, born too early to explore space. And the depressing thing is, I think this is true even if you are not trying to be a cartographer. It is also the case for art, science, music, and everything else.

Hear me out.

For example, in visual art, before modern art, paintings, i.e. color on a surface, mostly served one of three purposes: to capture reality, to articulate information, or to express a concept. To capture reality, we’re talking about cave paintings, portraits, and photographs. To articulate information, we’re talking about hieroglyphs, the written language, and mathematical symbols. To express a concept, we’re talking where artists break out of the plane between realism and symbolism, and try to create something that either has a very high barrier of entry, something that requires a lot of background knowledge to appreciate, e.g. abstract Chinese calligraphy, or a Rothko; or a very low barrier of entry, so, something that can communicate a mental state to the viewer without articulating the idea explicitly, e.g. the Scream, or a Rothko. This triangular chart of realism, symbolism, and expressionism, is essentially the “Earth” of art, where most if not all paintings can be placed. There might be a higher dimension to be explored (not literally, I’m not talking about sculptures), but it’s not obvious where or what that is.

Of course, that is a very very amateur and reductive take on art, but it is adequate for serving the purpose of explaining my idea that regardless of what field you’re in, the basic map of everything in your field has already been drawn, and it was probably drawn in the last 100 years or so, because most of the people who worked in your field probably lived in the last 100 years or so (more on this later). So, all that’s left to explore are the small crevices where millions of others haven’t bothered to fill in yet. There are no more big discoveries, only small ones.

This applies to every field across art and science, and especially in fields where new discoveries are exponentially more costly in labor and resources. For example, in high-energy physics, more and more advanced experiments require larger and larger particle accelerators, which require more and more human and material capital, so the likelihood for a lone genius to make a huge impact is less and less. This is why these large-scale experiments have longer and longer author lists whenever they publish a paper, and this is why there is a lot of criticism against the Nobel committee for refusing to award their science prizes to more than three individuals.

I argue that this diminishing odds of becoming a giant is also true for fields where new discoveries have a flat cost, such as in arts and material science, for instance. This is because of two things. First, knowledge is accumulative, so it is always easier to be more influential earlier in history. This is of course not a strict correlation, and there are historical and political factors, but it is generally true. Second, “giantness” is relative, so it is more difficult to look like a giant when there is more competition.

Throughout most of history, there were maybe a few dozen people per empire per golden age working on the arts and the sciences. The vast majority of people back then were sustenance farmers, and most people who were rich and fortunate enough to have the time and resources to do arts or science instead chose to become bureaucrats rulers, etc. And the general population was exponentially smaller the further back in history. Today, there are hundreds of scholars and artists at every university in every major city. Hundreds of thousands of people are exploring every field professionally. It is much easier to stake a claim in a field when you are the tenth person who has ever done it versus if you are the one-millionth person.

I am not arguing that there are a finite number of scientific things to be discovered and a finite number of songs to be written. I mean, of course, almost nothing is technically infinite, but a lot of them are infinite within the context of human existence. Although some fields are definitely more finite than others.

My main point is this: because of our time in human history, a huge portion of the things that can be done by an individual have already been done, and mostly in the last 100 years because of the explosion of population and human capital freed from sustenance farming. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we are going to run out of new discoveries, it only means that we are going to run out of discoveries that are possible for an individual to do alone.

And there is another angle to this. If you don’t want to join a large group like CERN to help progress a field like particle physics, you can still work in material science and contribute to the field by driving its diversification. Some people have likened these fields to stamp collecting, perhaps in an attempt to denigrate it — to say that they are not elegant like relativity and string theories. But I think those are unfounded and only justified by our human desire to rank vertical growth over diversification. Would you rather live in the 70s when every movie is original and groundbreaking? Or would you rather live today when there are a dozen movies for every franchise in every genre from every country in every language?

Thank you for your time.