Scientific Evolution in Digitized Books, Modeling, and Future Perspective

Pan-Jun Kim
​Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, Korea

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The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we investigate scientific evolution through systematic analysis of a massive corpus of digitized English texts between 1800 and 2008. We developed a mechanistic model to account for the observed results, indicating that slowly-but-commonly adopted science and technology surprisingly tend to have higher fitness than fast-and-commonly adopted ones. Our data analysis combined with mechanistic modeling sheds light on unbiased and quantitative analysis of scientific evolution in society. Here, I will discuss some issue between humankind and technology in the future.