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't just make that happen again on demand. Fundamental laws are in short supply.Whenever people tell me we'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:- a subfield that already exists and already has plenty of people working on it- an idea that was extensively investigated and carefully ruled out over 50 years ago- something that requires more money than the field will receive in total over the next 50 years- 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- a complicated, ad hoc model that isn't any more predictive than simpler models, but gives the modeller hundreds of shiny knobs to tune- a metaphysical suggestion about how to view what nature "truly" is, which amounts at best to rewriting existing laws with bigger, more "profound" wordsI can'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 correctly punished by low citations.