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“It should not be supposed that every advance in human knowledge increases the amount of information that has to be mastered by professionals. On the contrary, some of the most important progress in science is the discovery and testing of powerful new theories that allow large numbers of facts to be subsumed under a few general principles. There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories. Hence it is not safe to say that the professional chemist must learn more today than a half century ago, before the general laws of quantum mechanics were announced.” — Herbert A. Simon
It should not be supposed that every advance in human knowledge increases the amount of information that has to be mastered by professionals. On the contrary, some of the most important progress in science is the discovery and testing of powerful new theories that allow large numbers of facts to be subsumed under a few general principles. There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories. Hence it is not safe to say that the professional chemist must learn more today than a half century ago, before the general laws of quantum mechanics were announced.