> I think it’s hurting everything. We get scientists who are very good forward incrementers—they are good at doing the next step but they are not the people who change the field. They are not redirectors or reinitiators, who start a field over. And those are the people we need.
I doubt the problem is with the scientists. I know and work with lots of really smart and creative people in an academic environment, and I'm sure some of them would be capable of redirecting, reinitiating, of starting a field over -- were they given a chance. But just try to get funded for anything at all that isn't incremental and see how well you do. Scientific funding is so scarce, and becoming more and more so, that funding agencies only approve grants that are practically guaranteed successes, and those tend to be the incremental ones.
Maybe narrow testing is responsible for the plague of incremental science, but if so it's probably not the scientists' fault, but more likely because we've cultivated a society that isn't creative and thoughtful enough to appreciate the value of really novel science.
Most of the need in science is in advancing another step. For every major advancement we need tens of thousands of small advancements to refine and work out all the details. Physics was 99% solved in 1880 with just the work of finishing out the constants. In that 1% we were missing was relativity and quantum mechanics, and we know that there is something more but not what. However as big as those two are they are still < 5% of the physics needed are. (The numbers don't add up because now that we know about relativity we know it is more than 1%, but it isn't a significant factor in most real world needs which still get by on newton physics)
Yes there are areas of complete unknown in science (all over). However they are complete unknowns: you can spend a lifetime in false starts.
In Computer science the P=NP problem has been an important unknown for years and many have spent a large part of their lifetime on it and we still are not close to a solution. This is a known unknown, must of what remains is not even that well defined, just a case where "something funny" happens and we have no idea why and often can't figure out how to replicate it on demand.
I doubt the problem is with the scientists. I know and work with lots of really smart and creative people in an academic environment, and I'm sure some of them would be capable of redirecting, reinitiating, of starting a field over -- were they given a chance. But just try to get funded for anything at all that isn't incremental and see how well you do. Scientific funding is so scarce, and becoming more and more so, that funding agencies only approve grants that are practically guaranteed successes, and those tend to be the incremental ones.
Maybe narrow testing is responsible for the plague of incremental science, but if so it's probably not the scientists' fault, but more likely because we've cultivated a society that isn't creative and thoughtful enough to appreciate the value of really novel science.