String Theory, "It from (Qu)bit", etc. have been putting out a large amount of B.S. for many years now, and the hype itself became so common that, to compete with other B.S. the hype has now become over-the-top blatant nonsense.
Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc.
We need to make science actively painful (cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity, make sure no one wants to date them etc.) so it only attracts people in it for the right reasons :)
One commenter on that article points out that there is a symbiotic relation between scientists, the press and the public.
All of them desire spectacular results and there is little incentive to ever play down a paper.
The result is that scientists "polish" their results when communicating to the press, who again make sure that it "sounds good". In the end the public usually gets the truth only in so far as "could" means "there is a low but nonzero chance of this ever working, but only if there are massive engineering efforts and many more breakthroughs and economic and resource incentives line up right".
Putting scientists into the media game, instead of isolating them was a grave mistake. It even creates competition for gtants, based on how "flashy" the results are.
In the realm of technology, scientists are the idea guys. Lots of good ideas out there. But you need entrepreneurs and engineers and capital in order to see if it is something that will be useful to the public.
It may takes years of work, PhDs, and lots of research costs to get the findings (idea), but in the end ideas themselves are cheap.
> Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc.
And the administration loves them for it! And they will happily book expensive influencers and self-made media personalities to arrange workshops and courses in how to present your research in the simplest and most emotional ways - to maximize engagement and outreach. It's almost funny to see the disbelief in researchers' eyes when the extroverted influencer brings them the microphone and asks: ignore for a moment the specifics of your research, what are the three qualities that makes YOU unique and special?
> cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity
I can't even begin to describe how overjoyed I am to finally have found a fellow campaigner for implementing the glorious techniques of Maoist China in dealing with free thought.
String theory as it currently exists is very different to how it started. The original use case was actually as a precursor to the current model for partons: QCD.
(Side note: there is still another theory in QCD research that is used, called the Lund string model, but it is not related to string theory and should not be compared. I just bring it up for completeness)
This is not to say that I disagree with being more critical of science initiatives, but that heavy-handed approaches like jail and social punishment are not the silver bullet you may think they are. Theories get repurposed very frequently between departments and the relationship between a line of enquiry and the results it may produce is not always linear.
Really, science communication (especially from news outlets) itself should be defunded, as it misrepresents the topics discussed. In its place, (structured, public) science EDUCATION should be funded.
We have those. We tend to ignore them or call them kooks.
For good reason in (Large percentage) of cases. But I do feel that there are a few that are getting marginalized. Often because they are semi related to stuff that is politically unpopular.
Several of them are absolutely marginalized and not kooks at all. The reputation, unfortunately, sticks with them.
David Shaw is the poster child of rich people who succeeded at breaking through the elitism into the scientific establishment, but he went through the whole PhD process before "settling" for becoming a finance billionaire.
Isn’t he more of a poster child for “academics create academics”? His dad was a professor, his stepdad was a professor and he went straight through college and grad school to become a professor. What kind of elitism are you arguing that he faced?
1) The tools available to an individual are always progressing.
By "tools" I mean all of direct physical tools and materials, computational, theories and understandings, services, etc.
2) Big funded labs have business owners, stockholders, academic department heads, and grant comittees that have specific goals and ideas and topics they are willing to pay for.
Many of the most important discoveries were never on anyone's list of things they will pay for (until after it happened some other way first).
They only happened either by accident in real labs despite all conscious intention to be working on something else, or by people who didn't need anyone's permission and were just satisfying their own curiosity, and couldn't be told to work on something more sensible by any boss or other funding source.
3) It is true that some large scale things probably won't be advanced in a garage.
Then again, a lot of times large scale things are up-ended specifically from a garage exactly because the garage researcher does not have the option to address problems with (expensive/large/dangerous) brute force.
They need to somehow make pressure of a zillion psi, but they can't build a zillion psi machine, so instead they figure out how to align sound waves to create a zillion psi just where the waves meet or something, and that goes on to obsolete a huge industry and now everyone's making MrFusion's in their spare bedrooms and selling them on Etsy.
The smallness of the operation is the very cause of the discovery and would not have happened in a normal funded lab.
Most of it, but there are some corners. For example, high temperature superconductivity was discovered in 1986 [1]. The process is not so complicated, and can be done at home. Well, at least in a very good personal lab, for example see this video by Applied Science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU
I think the original team made like 100 samples using different metals and different oxygen proportion. Discovering the first one requires some brute force that needs a small team, and is too much for a single person. Anyway, it doesn't look too far away from something a single person can discover.
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote… Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
The thing that makes that quote so incredible is that it's from Albert Michelson in 1903. The same Michelson of the Michelson-Morley experiment [1] that was completed in 1887. The experiment he performed 16 years prior set the stage for the period of exponential and revolutionary progress that was about to be discovered by some unknown guy writing scientific papers while working as a low level inspector at a patent office [2] because no university was willing to take him on board.
Humanity, at any snapshot in time, believes they are on the bleeding edge of human progress, and that's because they are! Yet invariably we look back marveling at how little they knew. There's zero reason to think this trend has ended, or that we're even near the end of time where knowledge can be simply 'thought up', especially given the vast free resources available to all. The problem is that 'thinking it up' is extremely difficult.
That's a horrible out-of-context quote. The full quote:
"It may be well to reply to the very natural question: What would be the use of such extreme refinement in the science of measurement? Very briefly and in general terms the answer would be that in this direction the greater part of all future discovery must lie. The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions.
As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second—an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet by observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that "our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." It follows that every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery, and this will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for bringing to your notice the various methods and results which form the subject matter of these lectures."
Light Waves and Their Uses. By Albert A. Michelson. Published by The University of Chicago Press, 1903, pp 23-25.
Michelson was arguing exactly the opposite of the position you imply. In context, "the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote" is referring to the fact that new physics (e.g. relativity) tends not to invalidate the older physics which approximate it (e.g. newtonian dynamics) in common situations.
I don't believe the blurb changes the context of the quote.
He was arguing that the all the important and fundamental laws of physics had been discovered. And so all that remained was to work out what was causing perturbations at increasingly esoteric degrees of precision. In other words that the future of science rested on refining previous discoveries, instead of the discovery of new revolutionary concepts. In the words of our OP here that, "all the science that is possible to do "at home" [is] already done."
Yet of course he made these comments just before physics would be completely revolutionized, and rapidly lead to revolutions in life as we know it. This was prior to relativity, prior to quantum mechanics, even prior to atomic models. The thing that makes it utterly ironic is making such comments at such a time after being an inadvertent key player in the discoveries to come.
Quantum theory didn't completely overrule how physics works at large length scales. Relativity didn't completely overrule how physics works at slow speeds & sub-planetary length scales. These are the 'apparent exceptions' to the laws of physics Michelson refers to, which lead to 'the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions'. Validating both of those required 'extreme refinement in the science of measurement'. Look, for instance, at the 50 year effort required to validate the Bell Experiment.
Michelson further backs up this point in the next paragraph, where he provides several examples where precise measurements similarly lead to new science. Even more, look at his call to action: "Every means which facilitates accuracy in measurement is a possible factor in a future discovery".
His argument isn't dismissive of new science because it only leads to small differences in measurement. It's supportive of small measurements because it's required for new science.
I sometimes wish that the following words would require a license to be used - and such license could be suspended when the words are being used in a negligent or nefarious manner:
This comment speaks to the soul of my inner gripe. I try to avoid being pedantic, but I can never bring myself to replace this use of ‘all’ with ‘pretty much all’.
It’s just such a clear term. Now that I think of it, it might be one of the least ambiguously defined terms I can think of.
>Curious if there's any renowned independent scientists producing research at home and sharing directly online
closest thing is probably R&D at big companies, hence why so many academics joined Facebook, Google, etc. at least for computer science and AI related stuff
Might go back to this model over time. Guess it is no secret that academia is in strong decline. Lot of excellent people just don't bother anymore to enter that circus. They might do their own independent research after they succeeded financially.
It is possible to do surprising amounts on a shoestring budget. Ive seen cheap (Sub $1k) electron microscopes go up for sale. As well as a ton of other lab equipment.
Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their results on media, fudging experiments etc.
We need to make science actively painful (cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity, make sure no one wants to date them etc.) so it only attracts people in it for the right reasons :)