The quest for historically impactful science and technology provides
invaluable insight into the innovation dynamics of human society, yet many
studies are limited to qualitative and small-scale approaches. Here, we
investigate scientific evolution through systematic analysis of a massive
corpus of digitized English texts between 1800 and 2008. Our analysis reveals
great predictability for long-prevailing scientific concepts based on the
levels of their prior usage. Interestingly, once a threshold of early adoption
rates is passed even slightly, scientific concepts can exhibit sudden leaps in
their eventual lifetimes. We developed a mechanistic model to account for such
results, indicating that slowly-but-commonly adopted science and technology
surprisingly tend to have higher innate strength than fast-and-commonly adopted
ones. The model prediction for disciplines other than science was also well
verified. Our approach sheds light on unbiased and quantitative analysis of
scientific evolution in society, and may provide a useful basis for
policy-making.Comment: Supplementary material attache