10 Breakthrough Applied Sciences 2021
The breakthroughs and improvements that we uncover result in new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. Many discoveries also arose from pure chance, like the invention of penicillin on account of unintended lab contamination. Since the Nineteen Sixties, the idea that government funding of primary analysis would lead to the invention of marketable technologies has lost credibility. Probabilist Nassim Taleb argues that nationwide research programs that implement the notions of serendipity and convexity via frequent trial and error are more probably to lead to helpful improvements than research that aims to achieve particular outcomes. Other fields of ethics …