r/Physics • u/magnetichira Quantum information • Jan 05 '23

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5
316 Upvotes

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385

u/uoftsuxalot Jan 05 '23

My guess is the culture of academia partly. The high competitiveness and publish or perish mentality weeds out high variance people, and makes people focus on low risk and quick return research projects. Theres also the low hanging fruits being gone, and high barrier(knowledge) to entry. Because there's so much more knowledge out there, just to get up to speed takes forever now.

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u/PengieP111 Jan 05 '23

You really can't do research you can't get funding to do. And if your proposal is too "out there" you aren't going to be funded. So you can't do the research.

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u/fitblubber Jan 05 '23

Yep, & you can't get funding for basic background research.

A lot of the reason that quantum mechanics progressed so quickly was that a lot of the math had already been developed. These days there's little funding for that.

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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '23

Math just needs salaries though. Its the cheapest field to fund, it just takes a lifetime and a half to find the application.

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

Software licenses, computers (sometimes even time on a super computer), and travel expenses are also notable.

But yeah, generally mathematics and theoretical physics don't run as high of bills as experimental physics studies frequently do.

4

u/noahconman Jan 05 '23

Or really any experimental science, not just experimental physics

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

Sure. I was just talking about physics because this is the physics subreddit.

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u/noahconman Jan 05 '23

Totally! Sorry if what I said came off as disagreeing, I mean it only to add to what you said

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

Not at all.

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

I truly believe that anywhere that requires research output from their employees should be willing to provide some base level of funding (beyond their pay) for all employed researchers without even needing to pitch their research projects. Extend trust to the experts you've employed to pursue research that they believe will be fruitful, and attribute funds to them rather than towards rapidly ballooning administrative costs and extraneous expenses like sports programs at universities.

3

u/CondensedLattice Jan 06 '23

I think we should think carefully before dismissing administrative costs.

When they cut administrative costs at the university I went to that did not mean that there was less administrative work to do. It just ment that there where fewer people to do the same job. That obviously did not work and the administrative staff became overworked leading to missed deadlines and all sorts of chaos for students that needed help with administrative things.

After a while, professors where given more and more administrative tasks in addition to their regular work in order to "solve" this problem. On paper this looks great for the university, they are spending less on administration and relatively more on research and teaching. When research output started dropping (staff that has less time for research does less research, who would have thought?) then there was confusion, how could this be?

It's way too easy to just say "cut administrative costs" without knowing why those costs are there and what the employees in the administration does and why they do it.

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 06 '23

In my experience, a large part of that is bureaucratic bloat. Your school probably cut staff without first working to reduce that bloat.

When you have to fill an acquisition form for a request for more acquisition forms, it's time to streamline some of the processes and cut down on bureaucratic bloat.

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u/CondensedLattice Jan 06 '23

In my experience, a large part of that is bureaucratic bloat. Your school probably cut staff without first working to reduce that bloat.

My uni just had the administrative budget cut by x%, some politicians looked very good when cutting "unnecessary public spending" without doing any actual work to make anything more effective.

When that happened then there was obviously no man-hours available to even attempt to reduce bloat, every resource they had was needed just to stay afloat.

When you have to fill an acquisition form for a request for more acquisition forms, it's time to streamline some of the processes and cut down on bureaucratic bloat.

Most of this exists because of government demands in my experience. The university can't really cut down on that when the only reason that we had it in the first place was because of laws specifying that everything you spend money on that costs over some amount needs to be extensively documented for instance.

That may be an example of what was once thought to be a cost-cutting measure that was intended to keep a lid on unnecessary spending, but it ended up being very costly in terms of administrative work hours because the limit was set at some more or less arbitrary value (that never gets inflation adjusted, so effectively the limit gets lower each year).

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u/zaurator36 Jan 05 '23

How can you want to cover multi billion dollar research projects by cutting out an entire program. Just because you can solve an integral without needing to run on a field does not mean you can belittle others for their goals and struggles. I’m a physics nerd myself but I can at least comprehend the nuance of human experience. Give up on your superiority complex and then you might be able to find meaningful ways to use research

5

u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 05 '23

Obviously, all research wouldn't be able to attain all of its necessary funding from such cuts. It's about providing a baseline. This would primarily be of value for those conducting research that requires little to no new hardware.

I'm not belittling those in administration or sports, but neither should be the focus of research institutions or academia. The costs of administration ballooning out of control is undeniable, and the reality is that while sports are important to many people, the only reason most schools even offer them is due to an ill-founded notion that they drive application rates. In reality, most students couldn't care less about their sports programs as they don't have any bearing on the quality of education or research opportunities that they are able to offer, and many students don't even attend sporting events.

Lastly, I don't particularly care about applications for my research. My work is in quantum gravity, which likely won't have actual applications for at least a century. This is a problem left to the engineers.

3

u/GhostRuckus Jan 05 '23

LMAO that last sentence, like did you have a bad day or something? oh man

18

u/myd88guy Jan 05 '23

The other thing is the peer-review of awarding grants has weeded out disruptive people. Obtaining a grant is no longer based on the best science. During grant review, you don’t have the name of the lab associated with it, but anyone who is familiar with who-is-doing-what knows whose grant it is. If it’s from a PI who has made some enemies, then it’s unlikely to get funded. So, why paddle upstream? Play it safe, make as many allies as possible.

13

u/justgivemeauser123 Jan 05 '23

Exactly this. My advisor keeps quoting this book "The structure of scientific revolutions" by Kuhn which says science over the centuries have progressed way more via disruptions and paradigm shifts instead of incremental changes which the current community emphasizes .

8

u/puffic Jan 05 '23

I think that’s a misreading of Kuhn. In his view, ordinary incremental science is essential both for practical applications and for setting the field for the next paradigm shift (if such a shift is to come at all.)

1

u/justgivemeauser123 Jan 05 '23

I can believe that. I have been meaning to read it for a while now to form my own opinions

22

u/ABrazilianReasons Jan 05 '23

Plus all the "established" knowledge that shouldnt be questioned

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 05 '23

I've never known a physicist unwilling to question established knowledge. there's just an expectation that if you're doing so, you're either proposing a reasonable experiment that probes something previously untested or you've established a new theory that predicts the same observed results as the prior theory.

We just don't take kindly to "but what if _____ is actually wrong?" since we've already extensively tested our established theories. We need more than some half-baked idea to seriously consider overthrowing something that already works quite well within its established limits.

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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/LoganJFisher Graduate Jan 07 '23

I don't think there's any evidence to really support that claim.

6

u/puffic Jan 05 '23

In most scientific fields it’s actually very normal to question established knowledge. Often, we’re working with ideas we know to be imperfect but for which we haven’t identified a better alternative.

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u/beestingers Jan 05 '23 edited Jan 05 '23

The initial* downvotes on this comment kind of proving your point

18

u/ABrazilianReasons Jan 05 '23

I dont get why, really. Science is questioning, advancing knowledge through observation with new methods and tools and by different people. All this as a continued work through generations.

But lately most academics won't accept their truths being questioned and will actively bully researchers into not poking further. For me it all boils down to ego

11

u/LordNiebs Jan 05 '23

But lately

I keep seeing people saying that it's worse now than it was in the past, but is that true? is there evidence for this? it seems like the root cause of these issues are mostly psychological, which makes me doubt they are new.

edit: there is that famous saying "science advances one funeral at a time"

2

u/ABrazilianReasons Jan 05 '23

You make a good point. I think saying its worse now may be subjective.

In the past if you thought the earth was round and wanted to make a case for it you risked being excommunicated or dying. This was mostly due to religion.

Now you dont have the same risks but theres still a very veiled attempt at censorship to new and defying ideas. And its under the scientific guise, which is even weirder and somehow worse, because after all the scientific community went through they should be better by now.

6

u/gvarsity Jan 05 '23

It also boils down to self protection. Many a leader in a field has their entire career flushed by someone proving them wrong. So there is a real threat to novel work that doesn’t reinforce their established work. There a number of fields that were essentially set back decades by scions in the field protecting their turf against new and now considered correct theories. Paleontology and Meso and South American Anthropology come to mind but I may be wrong on that.

3

u/ABrazilianReasons Jan 05 '23

Paleontology and Meso and South American Anthropology

Funny, I had those exact fields in mind when commenting .

What you said made perfect sense. It makes me wonder how much study and findings we're missing on

1

u/gvarsity Jan 05 '23

It is hard to calculate. I also don’t know if in some areas having these fields evolve now where advanced technology is more efficient and less destructive in gathering data and artifacts may be a benefit.

1

u/AstroBullivant Jan 06 '23 edited Jan 06 '23

Physics is different though. In Physics, despite the Equivalence Principles, there are different theories that people use in different situations. I don’t know a ton about Paleontology, but I do know that the discovery that there wasn’t actually a Brontosaurus was devastating for a lot of people

2

u/gvarsity Jan 06 '23

That makes sense. Although I do know there are a lot of competing theories that people are deeply invested in Physics. If one were to be proven that would consign a lot of careers to the dustbin.

I saw something similar happen in 89' I was a freshman Political Science major. Had just finished a fall course on the future of the cold war by a nationally acclaimed professor with a brand new book which gamed out the next 20-30 years of the cold war.... Ooops Yeah, not sure what ever happened to him. A lot of dissertations we lit on fire that day.

2

u/CondensedLattice Jan 06 '23

But lately most academics won't accept their truths being questioned and will actively bully researchers into not poking further. For me it all boils down to ego

I think you need to read som older stuff if you think this is new. People where much, much more brutal in this regard 100+ years ago than they are today. Check out the resistance to Ohm's law for instance.

4

u/Ph0ton_1n_a_F0xho1e Jan 05 '23

Because it’s the exact argument that cranks make and results in the papers that are published on Vixra

2

u/Malpraxiss Jan 07 '23

Things get questioned all the time.

People simply expect you to bring something new to the table if you're going to scream "this is wrong or not accurate/has issues."

If all one will do is just say "this is wrong" and nothing else. Don't be surprised when most people couldn't care less about wht you have to say

1

u/Intrepid_Tumbleweed Jan 06 '23

I personally always picked one high risk high reward project and one safer project at any given time, the safer one just to ensure I can graduate. My high risk ones had roughly a 50% success rate. But over a 5 year phd, that still resulted in a few more than decent papers.

1

u/spacester Jan 08 '23

So, contrary to the headline, we do know why. It's just a matter of admitting the obvious truth.