This is just a guess, but speculative, radical stuff seems risky from a career point of view.
You're going to give up years of your life and work your ass off tirelessly toward the PhD that is necessary to open other doors. Do you bet it all on a far-out idea that might not pan out? You don't want to get too conservative, but you don't want to go wild either.
Then the same thing repeats when you're working on research or directing research. You need to get grant money. You need to publish.
You want to advance yourself within the field, and the way to do that is with either one amazing breakthrough or (more likely) a string of solid, significant work.
And once you've built a reputation, which is important, you can lose it all by venturing too far out.
Thus, while it's not necessarily that people are closed-minded, there are incentives for most people to take a middle road, which means a lot more evolutionary progress than revolutionary progress.
You're going to give up years of your life and work your ass off tirelessly toward the PhD that is necessary to open other doors. Do you bet it all on a far-out idea that might not pan out? You don't want to get too conservative, but you don't want to go wild either.
Then the same thing repeats when you're working on research or directing research. You need to get grant money. You need to publish.
You want to advance yourself within the field, and the way to do that is with either one amazing breakthrough or (more likely) a string of solid, significant work.
And once you've built a reputation, which is important, you can lose it all by venturing too far out.
Thus, while it's not necessarily that people are closed-minded, there are incentives for most people to take a middle road, which means a lot more evolutionary progress than revolutionary progress.