 To be sure, working out such a timescale of revolutions and their sizes in the history of science would be difficult and controversial, but Nicholas Rescher (1978, 2006) has begun the task in terms of ranking scientific discoveries and studying their distribution over time. Derek Price (1963) had previously introduced quantitative historical considerations into history of science, pointing out, among many other things, the exponential increase in the number of scientists and quantity of their publications since the Scientific Revolution. Such an exponential increase, faster than world population increase, obviously cannot continue forever and, in fact, was already beginning to plateau in industrialized nations in the 1960s. Among philosophers, Rescher was probably the first to analyze aggregate data concerning scientific innovation, arguing that, as research progresses, discoveries of a given magnitude become more difficult. Rescher concludes that we must eventually expect a decrease in the rate of discovery of a given magnitude and hence, presumably, a similar decrease in the rate of scientific revolutions. Although he does not mention Schumpeter in this work, he expresses a similar view: