Chain Reaction of Ideas: Can Radioactive Decay Predict Technological Innovation?

Abstract

This work demonstrates the application of a birth-death Markov process, inspired by radioactive decay, to capture the dynamics of innovation processes. Leveraging the Bass diffusion model, we derive a Gompertz-like function explaining the long-term innovation trends. The validity of our model is confirmed using citation data, Google trends, and a recurrent neural network, which also reveals short-term fluctuations. Further analysis through an automaton model suggests these fluctuations can arise from the inherent stochastic nature of the underlying physics.