Science as practiced today is very sick

"Sick" as in unhealthy.  Something is very wrong in how science is done, and people are talking about it:

According to theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, impaired methodology and groupthink is retarding the discovery of new physics.

The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after theother is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

Some have called it a crisis. But I don’t think “crisis” describes the current situation well: Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what they’ve been doing for 40 years, blathering about naturalness and multiversesand shifting their “predictions,” once again, to the next larger particle collider.

This is a long and detailed discussion which is hard to excerpt.  This bit seems very important as to the institutional rot:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

This is not a problem that will go away by itself.

As I said, this is hard to excerpt but is really important.  RTWT.

I've been beating the drum of institutional rot in the scientific community for a long time.  This is more than just the chicanery that passes itself off as mainstream Climate Science®, this is describing how the institutions that are supposed to support scientific research are actively hindering it.  Here are a few from the archives:

The Iron Law and the bureaucratization of science.  This post makes the case that scientific discoveries are not appearing faster than they did a century ago, despite the vast increase in the number of people who "do science" for a living.  Long and hard to excerpt but this is the key bit:

The billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on scientific research do not seem to be accelerating the advance of scientific discovery.  Well, not obviously, in any case.  However, they do appear to be stunningly successful in creating and nourishing a scientific bureaucracy (as Lewis points out).  Bureaucracies have particular well understood characteristics, most interesting of which is Pournelle's Iron Law:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Think of the Iron Law, and a representative of each class of people.  Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-Rays (see the chart above), one of the great scientific advances of the 1890s.  Curtis G. Callan, Jr. of Princeton University is President of the American Physical Society.  Who does the Iron Law predict will gain control of the funding?

I can't believe that scientists today are less brilliant than Röntgen.  With so many more of them working today, something must explain the lack of expected progress.  The Iron Law does just that.  Consider all the potential topics that a brilliant young physicist might choose from.  Some of these might threaten Dr. Callan's position and funding.  The Iron Law predicts that the bureaucracy will respond to stifle this threatening research.  

A couple people left comments to the effect that a century ago there was a lot more low hanging fruit than today.  We've discovered the easy things and what's left is harder.  That's a fair assessment but simply can't explain the lack of ground breaking new discoveries.  Surely we haven't learned 80% of all there is to know about the Universe.  Why then are things going so slowly with all these scientists working on it?  This post dovetails so close with Dr. Hossenfelder's as to be a bit eerie.  And it's from almost 8 years ago.

Soviet Science delves into a specific incident that illustrates this "control from the top" problem in science.  Scientists at CERN got their marching orders telling them what they should NOT talk about:

As with Galileo, we see bad things happening when the State intervenes in a scientific discussion.  Good thing that would never happen in the West.  Oh, wait:

The chief of the world's leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets") experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN's proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.

"I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them," reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

Because, Heuer says, "That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters."

If you suspect that scientists are only supposed to enter the "highly political arena of the climate change debate" when they're presenting evidence of Manmade Global Warming, then you're as nasty and suspicious as I am.

The whole brouhaha was about the Svensmark Hypothesis which posits that Cosmic Rays striking the Earth's atmosphere generate aerosols which lead to cloud formation.  This is dangerous to mainstream Climate Science since the number of cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere is controlled by the Sun's magnetic field - a stronger field means fewer strikes and therefore fewer clouds (and a higher temperature).  CERN is involved because as the world's largest cyclotron (what we used to call "Atom Smasher"), it's where the experiment was performed and Svensmark's hypothesis confirmed - cosmic rays striking the atmosphere do indeed lead to aerosol formation.  This clearly threatens the "Carbon Dioxide is the control knob for global temperature" position and so the CERN Director basically told all his people to STFU.  This is another post from 2011 and so this is something that I've been going on about for a long, long time.  RTWT and the post about Svensmark and you'll know more about real climate science that 99% of people.

In Science and the Cold Civil War I give a number of examples showing just how nasty the current situation is, with the "Politics of Personal Destruction" as a key technique to try to keep everyone on the reservation.  This is impossible to excerpt, but you might want to take a shower after reading about the examples.  "Nasty" doesn't even begin to describe the disfunction that is institutional science today.

And I haven't even mentioned Retraction Watch, which publishes retracted scientific papers and other news (did you know that Duke University is about to settle a lawsuit alleging $200M in grant fraud?  I hadn't).  I also haven't talked about the massive crisis in reproduceability that the scientific community is going through.  These two items are effects, not a cause.  The cause it the horrible state of science as practiced today.