The pace of scientific &quot;leaps&quot; would be very hard to quantify, and it&#x27;s certainly not my impression that it&#x27;s &quot;speeding up&quot;.<p>Rather, it&#x27;s my impression that there&#x27;s been a pretty consistent pace of scientific discoveries for the past 80 years. Advancing technology certainly helps, but technology has been advancing rapidly for quite some time.<p>The last 20 years hasn&#x27;t been a big difference from the 20 before it on the hardware end of things.<p>Recent science has seen an increase in discoveries added by &quot;big data&quot; science (CERN, astronomy) but that&#x27;s just one more tool in the researchers toolbelt.