Nature 320, 724 - 726 (24 April 1986); doi:10.1038/320724a0

How many more discoveries in the Universe?

Martin Harwit & Roger Hildebrand

Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-6801, USA
Enrico Fermi Institute, Department of Physics, and Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The Univesity of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

It is generally assumed that the potential scope of any scientific discipline is quite incalculable. Yet the discovery of the Earth's major rivers, mountains and seas, an enterprise that may have seemed endless to Ptolemy's contemporaries, is now essentially complete. The same may soon be said about the discovery of new plants and animals on Earth¹. Harwit^2,3 has put forward a procedure for estimating the number of observational phenomena remaining to be discovered in astronomy. Here we describe a statistical approach which supports the conclusion that the number of phenomena already discovered represents an appreciable fraction of those that can can be found.

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