664542 external_news 1673294005 1675362793 Is science better when it disrupts or when there are just incremental improvements to previous knowledge? The topic was analyzed in a recent study, and it seems that researchers have spent these past years improving things rather than trying to revolutionize everything. The study suggests that the level of "disruptiveness" in scientific research has gone way down in the 2000s compared to the last half-century. Yian Yin, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, highlights how disruptiveness is not inherently good, and incremental science is not necessarily bad. Yin cites the first direct observation of gravitational waves, a landmark discovery that was both revolutionary and the product of incremental science. Georgia Tech researchers, many from the School of Physics, worked with researchers at the Laser Interferomoter Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) on the gravitational wave observations. (This coverage also appeared in Nature and Inside Higher Education.)

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