Model of development of science by the example of limnology |
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Authors: | V V Menshutkin V F Levchenko |
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Institution: | (1) University of California, San Francisco, California, USA |
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Abstract: | Limnology—the science about lakes—is the young and relatively closed area of studies; its existence is owing to several hundreds
of scientists. The International Society of Limnologists holds its meetings since 1922. We used materials of these meetings
to find out the main stages of development of this science; among these stages there were both fast and relatively calm periods.
Based on analysis of these data, we constructed a model of development of the science, the same data being used for tuning
and verification of the model. We have suggested that the main regularities and mechanisms of development of limnology can
be extrapolated to other sciences. The main “acting person” in the model is population of scientists. Each scientist, with
some probability, can propose new ideas as well as use in his studies some particular complex of the already accumulated knowledge
and ideas. The model also takes into consideration how the scientific information is spreading, as well as some individual
peculiarities of model scientists, such as age, experience, communicability. After the model parameters had been chosen in
such a way that is described adequately development of limnology, we performed a series of experiments by changing some of
the characteristics and obtained rather unexpected results published preliminary in the short work (Levchenko, V.F. and Menshutkin,
V.V., Int. J. Comput. Anticip. Syst., 2008, vol. 22, pp. 63–75) and discussed here in the greater detail. It is revealed that development of science occurs irregularly
and is sharply decelerated at low level of communication between scientists and the absence of scientific schools, while the
age of “scientific youth” of scientist usually begins only after 40 years. |
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