The scientific enterprise has grown exponentially for more than 300 years. The growth rate has been so high that professors now at retirement havewitnessed the publication of more than 95% of the literature. Such compounding growth is necessarily transient and the predicted saturation has already occurred in some major disciplines, for example physics. Yet even a steady-state science can be quite dynamic, composed of a succession of rapidly overturning subfields that grow up exponentially and saturate as the prime discoveries are mined out, typically within less than a decade. Some subfields eventually decay to a lower level of activity as tenured professors hired in the exponential era retire, but others are rejuvenated because of novel breakthroughs that trigger new rounds of exponential growth and saturation. The current debate over the future of science can be framed in terms of the intrinsic richness of its transient subdisciplines. Examples are given from geology, theoretical physics, mathematics and biology.

John Suppe is Blair Professor and former chair of Geosciences at Princeton University. His fault-bend folding and critical taper-wedge mechanics provide fundamental insight into understanding of deformational processes and have transformed oil exploration. He was guest investigator on the NASA Magellan Mission to Venus where his group showed Venus was geologically alive. A recent interest is modeling the growth and dynamics of scientific fields. His honors include a Guggenheim and election to the National Academy of Sciences.

Fall 1999