The Problems in Science These Days

The scientific community is composed of human beings and suffers from problems similar to social systems, such as religious or political systems, being implemented by humans around the world in different forms. This might sound a bit of an exaggeration but let me put forth the characteristics of an established belief or political system and discuss how all of these characteristics are found in the contemporary scientific community. I have a career in science and have spent most of my scientific career trying to propose new ideas. I have succeeded sometimes but not always, however, with time I have gained a better insight on how the community really functions.

Any enforced belief or political system managed by human beings has the following salient features:

1. An atmosphere in which you cannot openly question established ideas.

2. A system to implement established ideas.

3. People who question established ideas are ridiculed or have to suffer in some way.

4. A group of people who play the role of policing and monitor people who question these ideas.

The current system in academia is mostly designed to teach what is established in science and not to question it. For instance there are no courses in academia that train students to question established theories and make sure their bias is not involved in judging these theories. There should be courses in universities, especially at the graduate level to teach students to be creative, just as we teach kids to be creative in art classes.

Furthermore, there are loop holes or short comings in any theory of science, even the established ones. When professors teach these theories they tend to not touch on these loop holes either because they do not know of these themselves or because they do not want to present these theories as incomplete.

The second point mentioned above is the presence of a system to implement established ideas. The journals in science mostly play this role. In order to establish a career in science we have to make sure that we continue publishing. However, the journals make sure that they publish ideas that either agree with established theories or deviate slightly from them. The famous preprint website Arxiv is a great example of how established theories are enforced. I have personal experience of being on their watch list. At some point in my career they would always put my papers on hold. They have a very secretive system of reviewing papers which they do not usually make public. The famous nobel laureate, Prof. Brian Josephson has been trying to confront them for a while now. There is a website called Vixra established by Philip Gibbs to try to present an alternative to arxiv. There is also a website that presents unpleasant experiences of different people with Arxiv.

I wrote a blog earlier in which the last two points are made evident. The last two points are especially relevant these days with the announcement of a plan for a new collider by CERN (about which I wrote here). Sabine Hossenfelder, who is not in favor of this plan is being criticized and in some cases ridiculed (see Lubos Motl’s blog) for saying something that senior physicists see as an attack on their plans to make progress in science. Similarly, people writing in favor of this plan are being celebrated.

If you disagree with what I have discussed above then there is a good chance you don't know about what happened to Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the most celebrated physicists in the history of science. He was frequently ridiculed by his fellow scientists because his theories were considered incorrect by them. This is understood to be one of the reasons behind his suicide.  His theories, however, laid the foundations of modern statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's time was much long ago, the scientific community is much bigger today and worst of all their is a lot of involvement by politicians (who always make things worse). Time will tell if things change for the better or worse but we need to think of strategies to cleanse the scientific community of these problems otherwise science will end up just being another belief system.