Stagnation and Scientific Incentives
As an academic I will again make the dull but necessary point: figuring out the fundamental laws of nature is hard, stagnation is the norm, and the advances of the mid-20th century were the aftershocks of the great revolutions of quantum mechanics and relativity. You can&#x27;t just make that happen again on demand. Fundamental laws are in short supply.<p>Whenever people tell me we&#x27;re stagnating I ask them to name an alternative. So far, from best to worst case, every answer has fallen into one of the following buckets:<p>- a subfield that already exists and already has plenty of people working on it<p>- an idea that was extensively investigated and carefully ruled out over 50 years ago<p>- something that requires more money than the field will receive in total over the next 50 years<p>- a mathematical formalism which simply refactors existing laws in a way that makes them unreadable to almost everyone, without a chance of leading to any new predictions<p>- a complicated, ad hoc model that isn&#x27;t any more predictive than simpler models, but gives the modeller hundreds of shiny knobs to tune<p>- a metaphysical suggestion about how to view what nature &quot;truly&quot; is, which amounts at best to rewriting existing laws with bigger, more &quot;profound&quot; words<p>I can&#x27;t see how this is going to be fixed by changing how citations work. If anything, in my experience the particularly bad stuff has been <i>correctly</i> punished by low citations.