The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time by Will Durant, discuss the greatness of mind well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PU8M128s4vU

Plus more readings:

http://www.rosenfels.org/Durant.pdf

https://fas.org/sgp/eprint/discovery.pdf

This is a wonderful question, but also very broad in its scope. I hope this kicks off an interesting conversation!!

FYI, my background and professional activities have spanned pharmaceutical sciences to physics (I am a pharmacist and Ph.D. in physics), and I have an interest in philosophy as well as the practice of science in multiple areas. I am also old enough to have depended on slide rules, then calculators, then crude computers with FORTRAN, then Excel... I have seen the explosion of technology impact the practice of science as well as education.

Just a single point for now (as I said, this is a wonderfully broad topic).

Most early progress was made with thought experiments (gedanken), pencil and paper. Mathematics was developed to be a tool (or the tool) of physics, and our minds took us a very long way.

Nowadays, there are still great thinkers and mathematics is actually in a bit of a golden age again. Physics is mired in the search for a theory of everything, and making great intellectual strides with string theory and the like, but those ingenious endeavors are perhaps not getting closer to the answer. (That is another topic for another day.)

On the other hand, technology is shiny and glamorous. Each new generation of technology can produce data that was not seen before, some of which is confirmatory and some of which is new and surprising. It has been my observation that we are currently in a period of big science, driven by technology more than thoughts and understanding. We see more and more papers published disclosing data and observations, while papers trying to explain systems with mathematical models are more and more criticized for lacking data. This seems to be the new paradigm in most arenas... data rules more than models.

Please do not interpret this as implying there is no thought nor greater understanding. This is just where things stand now. When the new data stops opening new avenues of thought or needs more complete explanation, the paradigm will shift. However, at this time, I notice very few scientists think first and do second... math and modeling should be at the forefront given the explosion in computing power, but there are fewer practitioners in this arena because the prerequisite knowledge in math and computation is too steep.

This will surely change... computational biology, computational chemistry and drug design, chemometrics, etc. all highlight what happens when the need for understanding on any level enters through computational abilities. (This is reflective of the history of physics, for instance.)

The bottom line is that we are now making faster progress in our ability to observe via technology than understand via analysis. It will change, and when it does, more thought will go into the physical meaning of what we observe.

However, thought will also go into the "meaning" of theories themselves. This will be motivated somewhat by what we actually see (objects that I can see with my eyes, like a tree for instance) vs. what we observe by inference (measuring responses that infer events, rather than directly observing the events... for instance, electronic orbital transitions giving off discrete light frequencies, or thermal events detected by differential scanning calorimetry).

So, as an extreme example... do we really know that electrons exist as we describe them, or are they just theoretical manifestations of a mathematical or physical model that explains what we "see"? If we interpret all experimental data in terms of the picture or model, then there would be no external footing to say we don't see electrons as described by the model. (I don't mean to imply that electrons don't exist, but am just using them as an example of the idea.)

I suspect that technology will progress faster than human thought, but will never completely leave it behind... we need to explain what we see, and specifically develop methods to quantitatively evaluate our observations, but also interpret the philosophical implications.

I do apologize for rambling, but hope this piques some interest.

Thanks for reading!

Bob

Dear Bob,

I found your views ad comment very valuable and well founded. Indeed the technological advancements to day are very fast and touching every aspect of daily life of all mankind. So do I, hold philosophy and wisdom very dear to me.

However, in realm of philosophy one may agree that there still are many new theories and unsolved problems that humanity did not address yet.

For readers who may join our communication, following are just very few examples of quite interesting next generation materials research.

1) The Next Generation Materials Research leads groundbreaking R&D on a wide array of advanced technologies such as next-generation energy storage and display (source: https://www.sra.samsung.com/research/next-generation-materials-research)

2) Smart materials, such as fiber reinforced cementitious composites, are designed at the molecular level (source: http://cee.umich.edu/structural/facilities/next-gen-infrastructure)

3) Researchers at University of Chicago are exploring new paradigms for material fabrication and response, and exploiting feedback between structure and dynamics (source: https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/03/25/materials-research-science-and-engineering-center-receives-206-million-grant)