SCR 01/12M · RenaissanceIMG.COPERNICAN
01/12Renaissance
Science never stops progressing – so how can it have a renaissance?
Renaissance, not restoration
The arts can be reborn: statues and poems from two thousand years ago are still models today. Science, though, keeps progressing; any secondary-school student now understands the motions of the heavens better than Ptolemy did. When we speak of “the renaissance of science” and call it RenaScience, we are of course not trying to bring back the heliocentrism of the ancient Greeks. Even Copernicus only borrowed courage from the ancients. In 1543, in the dedication of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, he cited Cicero and Plutarch to show that the idea of a moving Earth was an old one; his manuscript also mentioned Aristarchus, the first to put the Sun at the centre, but the passage was cut before printing. A renaissance has never been a restoration: the Renaissance borrowed the names of the ancients to do what had never been done before.
What we want to revive is not knowledge but a spirit. Learning has been reborn several times in history – among the Romans, among the Arabs, in twelfth-century Europe. But the Renaissance everyone knows turned out to be the last: after it, learning never declined again, because it had a new social setting and a new medium – civil society, and the movable-type printing press. Today AI has brought another seismic shift in media.
The Copernican universe, with the systems of Ptolemy and others in the corners. Eighteenth-century celestial chart, engraving. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 02/12M · OriginIMG.ARCHIMEDES
02/12Origin
What exactly are we trying to revive?
Delight in knowing
In ancient Greece, seeking knowledge was not a job. Aristotle held that all human beings by nature desire to know, and that it is wonder that first sets them philosophizing. Learning was something people with leisure did for its own sake: our word “school” comes from the Greek for “leisure”. The Greeks were competitive, too; they debated and contended to win honour. Their delight was never high-minded, but nor was it a way to earn their bread. Driven by curiosity, seeking knowledge for its own sake: that is the original spirit of science.
Then science grew up. It learned to experiment and to measure, to publish in the open, to ally itself with technology and to answer for its consequences. None of this needs to be thrown away. Staying true to a first impulse is not the same as staying a child; someone who has learned to keep their feet on the ground need not lose the urge to look up at the stars. What we want is for science, now fully grown, to find its childlike heart again.
Archimedes bent over his calculations. Line engraving after Raphael. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 03/12M · Assembly lineIMG.BABEL
03/12Assembly line
How did science become a job?
The first alienation: the assembly line
From the nineteenth century onwards, research universities, laboratories and the degree system turned science into a profession – and broke it down into an assembly line. During the Second World War, the uranium-isotope separation plant at Oak Ridge recruited some ten thousand young women from rural Tennessee to watch its dials. As Kenneth Nichols, who ran the project, recalled, the women beat Ernest Lawrence’s physicists in a production race: they simply followed instructions, while the scientists could not resist stopping to get to the bottom of every tiny wobble in the readings.
The logic of the assembly line is that a band of all-round craftsmen following their own interests is no match for a crew of workers each drilled in a single motion. As knowledge piles up, the patch each person guards grows narrower, teams grow larger and people make their first inventions later in life – what the economist Benjamin Jones called the “death of the Renaissance man”. Once research became a job, it also drew in many people who do not love knowledge and simply need a job. You can hardly blame them: an assembly line never needed love in the first place.
The building of the Tower of Babel in one panorama: quarrying, brick-making, hauling, each to his task. Engraving, seventeenth century. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 04/12M · The paperIMG.PRINTOFFICE
04/12The paper
How did the paper win for three hundred years?
The body print gave to knowledge
Knowledge never exists naked. It has lived in conversations and on lecterns, on bamboo slips, in books and in letters. In 1665 scholarly journals were founded in Paris and then in London, and the paper became the body that the age of print and post handed to modern science. It could be printed and mailed; it could register priority; it let complete strangers check and rebut one another on the same page. It won for more than three centuries not because it was closest to the truth, but because it best suited that whole environment.
It has its blind spots, too. A paper keeps only the path that worked; failed experiments are buried out of sight. It assumes its readers are peers, and beginners and the public cannot squeeze into this narrow-necked bottle. The World Wide Web was born at CERN in 1989 precisely so that scientists could share documents; more than thirty years on, the main form a paper takes online is still a PDF imitating a printed page.
Composing, proofing and inking in a printing office. Woodcut, nineteenth century, after Stradanus. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 05/12M · PerishIMG.TREADMILL
05/12Perish
Why did publishing become a matter of life and death?
The second alienation: publish or perish
Once papers are counted and used to hand out jobs, funding and honours, “publish or perish” becomes the law of academic survival. Some researchers slice a single study into “least publishable units”, publishing four short papers instead of one long one. A 2018 study found 265 hyperprolific authors who, in at least one year, put their names to a paper every five days on average. Petty publishing chores wear away the passion for knowledge, bit by bit.
Holding all this up is a pyramid. An engineering professor in the United States trains an average of 7.8 PhDs over a career, and only one of them can take over the professor’s post. The fiercest critics go so far as to compare the research doctorate to a Ponzi scheme, since the pyramid stands only as long as newcomers keep pouring in. China’s doctoral graduates rose from 55,000 in 2016 to 112,900 in 2025, while births over the same period fell from 18.83 million to 7.92 million. More than a century ago, Max Weber was already calling the academic career a wild gamble.
Middlesex House of Correction: prisoners treading the wheel while others sit waiting their turn. Print, nineteenth century. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 07/12M · Turning pointIMG.PASCAL
07/12Turning point
Why is the crisis also a turning point?
The flood can breach the walls too
Industrial production runs on replication, and it demanded that people, too, be replicable and interchangeable, like parts; education and research followed the same mould, mass-producing specialists. Information, however, can be copied almost for free, and AI can learn everything that can be learned by rote. The burden of specialization can now be shared with machines: with AI, one person can get the lie of the land in an unfamiliar field in a few days, check the derivations and get the code running.
When writing is no longer scarce, the paradigm of paper supremacy starts to loosen. Being able to write something up no longer vouches for anything; what is scarce now is asking, verifying, explaining and judging. In 2026 a 23-year-old with no professional training in mathematics used AI to prise open an Erdős problem that had stood unsolved for sixty years. AI may turn many professions back into “liberal arts” in the old sense.
Cutaway of the mechanism of Pascal’s calculator. Engraving by Bénard, plate from the Encyclopédie. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 08/12M · EveryoneIMG.MONTGOLFIER
08/12Everyone
Can everyone be a scientist?
From profession back to passion
Scientists were once mostly amateurs; later, science became a profession. Once the walls went up, people without professional training had almost nowhere to stand, and “folk scientist” became a byword for crank. Today the door has opened again. AI can keep a layperson company through the literature of an unfamiliar field, check derivations and write code, and researchers who cross disciplines can, for the first time, go deep enough into the field next door. Galaxy Zoo, Foldit and the Vesuvius Challenge have all shown that when amateurs play seriously, they can solve real problems.
That everyone can be a scientist does not mean that everyone has to be one, still less that every idea counts. Only the practical barriers have come down; you still have to learn the community’s language and stand up to other people’s scrutiny. But science can turn from a rigid profession back into a lively passion: some will make it their living, and many more will make it their pleasure. That, we believe, is the renaissance of science.
1783: the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon rises at Versailles before a vast crowd. Coloured etching. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 09/12M · Hands-onIMG.FARADAY
09/12Hands-on
How can ordinary people get hands-on with research?
Research as a turn-based game
Imagine research as a turn-based game. The researcher writes a direction brief; a team of AIs takes a turn – searching, reasoning, experimenting, plotting, hunting for errors – and hands back a battle report. The human then decides whether to carry on, switch to another branch, reload an earlier save or call a halt. Every save point is a version of the work.
Humans have at least five places in the game. The Terminator decides when to stop; the Commander gives the AIs their heading and marks the no-go zones; the Warden keeps watch over ethics, funding and disclosure; the Dreamer throws out hunches for the AIs to test; and by far the largest group is the Audience. Spectators may not contribute much of substance, but they are the steadiest source of feedback. Their suggestions go first into the battle report’s “atmosphere layer”, and become instructions only if the researcher adopts them. Tips are not a traffic metric either: they are distribution according to delight in its most direct form.
Faraday lecturing at the Royal Institution, with Prince Albert and two of the princes in the audience. Wood engraving, Illustrated London News, 1856. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 10/12M · New bodyIMG.FLEA
10/12New body
If not in papers, where should knowledge live?
A new body for knowledge
A single piece of research can have seven layers at once: the core argument; evidence you can click open; a process record that keeps the detours; explanations in video and diagrams; public records of governance and AI use; an interface for machines to read; and a shared space where those who come later can criticize, replicate and fork the work. The public comes in through the explanations, beginners through the map, peers through the argument, replicators through the data, overseers through the governance record, and AI through the interface. The paper need not disappear; it goes back to being one entrance among several.
Such works are then organized around questions: one page per topic, making clear what it asks, with follow-up questions on each page leading to other topics, so that anyone who wants to go further can dive down into the deep read, the data and the process. What you are reading is a web of exactly this kind. Science was multimodal from the start: in 1665 Robert Hooke’s Micrographia turned a single flea into a huge copperplate engraving.
The flea in Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665. Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0
SCR 11/12M · StandardsIMG.SPRAT
11/12Standards
The bar is lower – so where do standards come from?
Three rules and a calling card
Seventeenth-century science established facts through witnessing; twentieth-century science, through peer review. The age of AI needs new technologies of witnessing, and we have written them down as three rules: evidence you can click open; results someone can explain; AI in plain sight. The third rule is not a demand that authors confess: the platform automatically logs every AI contribution in the process record. The line is drawn not at whether AI was used, but at whether anyone lied or misled readers.
Reputation comes from verifiable achievements, not from paper counts. An academic calling card lists the problems you have solved, the roles you have played and the chains of evidence that have survived replication; if a result is retracted, its trophy is void. Models will come and go, generation after generation, but what researchers have done in their community, the trust they have earned and the work they leave behind will not reset to zero.
Title page of Sprat’s History of the Royal-Society of London, 1667. Wellcome Collection · Public domain
SCR 12/12M · CuriosityGEN.PARTICLES
12/12Curiosity
In the end, why do science at all?
Give science back to curiosity
Research did not begin as a secure job or as a way to make money for humankind; it began as the wish to understand. AI can talk over the parts of the plot we missed, but it cannot read the mystery for us: following the reasoning is the pleasure itself.
Giving science back to curiosity is not a sentimental slogan; it is a reordering of values. Once science became a profession, academia, like every other trade, practised distribution according to labour. Now that AI has made labour abundant, it is time for distribution according to delight: giving more to those who ask better questions, who can see what is interesting, and who can make things interesting for others. Curiosity was never high-minded, and delights come in higher and lower kinds: taste must be cultivated, and standards must not drop. The final yardstick is still “benefiting ordinary people”: the good must reach everyday lives.
That is why we are building a curation platform, a new journal and a research-game engine called Wendao. The paper was a great invention of the age of print; it should not become the last idol of the age of AI. Science need not go back to ancient Greece, but it can recover the delight the Greeks took in knowing. This is RenaScience: the renaissance of science.