Have we only scratched the surface?

“In this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.” In 1874, Max Plank’s physics professor was explaining to him why he should not study physics. In 1900 Plank invented quantum mechanics.

In the early 1980s I was told almost exactly the same thing by a Nobel economist but politely did not mention the earlier absurdity. Of course, he didn’t know this famous story. Economists rarely study any science.

After Einstein’s 1905 discovery of special relativity (time slows more the faster you move) and his 1915 theory of general relativity (gravity slows the passage of time) physicists adopted a new attitude toward science. And they still believe that shocking new and important discoveries are almost certainly waiting to be made. The goal is to prove the older theories wrong or discover a revolutionary new truth.

As an economics graduate student in the late 1970s, my smartest teaching assistant revealed that his career goal was to reprove Adam Smith’s invisible-hand insight in even more generality. Doing this had already resulted in three Nobel Prizes, so why not keep with the program? Contrast this to the attitude of physicists looking for the Higgs boson with the Large Hadron Collider.

All of the dozens of news stories I read during the search process asked the physicists what they expected to find. And every one of them said they were hoping to find something that proved the Standard Model of particle physics to be wrong in some important way. But they were afraid they would be disappointed.

In fact, they were disappointed, but they are still trying just as hard to disprove their most successful theory.

Adam Smith’s insight was brilliant and still provides absolutely essential insights, just as Newton’s theory of gravity is still used to guide spaceships to Mars. But economists need to adopt the attitude of modern physicists if they want to make real progress.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

—Max Plank, 1947

 

Professor Planck, of Berlin, the famous originator of the Quantum Theory, once remarked to me that in early life he had thought of studying economics, but had found it too difficult! 

—Keynes, 1924