Europe Twice Enabled Contemporary Global Science, Too Few Appreciate It

Since the turn of the 20th century, the number of scientific journal research articles reporting new discoveries—from the mundane to the sublime—has unceasingly doubled nearly every decade. Today, the annual volume is well over three million papers, the majority of which appear in thousands of globally accessible, main scientific journals covering the range of the sciences, especially science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM), and appearing in many languages but chiefly the contemporary lingua franca of English. Too often dialogue about the state of science is needlessly nationalistic, with an overabundance of references to scientific and technology competition between the U.S. and China (e.g. The Economist 2024). What most observers do not appreciate is that Europe has twice played a pivotal role—at critical junctures—in the development of what can fittingly be described as global mega-science, without which the world’s STEMM knowledge would be significantly less advanced than it is now.