Re:The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of phy...
by scythe on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @03:04PM
(#18497177)
>And if you submit a proposal that says "I'm going to go off and work on this crazy idea, and maybe there's a one in a thousand chance that I'll discover some of the secrets of the universe, and a 99.9% chance that I'll come up with bubkes," you get turned down.
>But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress.
The problem is, as I understand it: suppose some people locked themselves in their attic and worked on physics problems; how does society know that they're actually working on physics and not merely twiddling their thumbs?
The whole publication-review-credit-tenure-grant circuit was invented to address exactly that situation. In order to replace it, you need some other way of convincing the funding bodies that their money is actually paying for something.
>But if a thousand really smart people did this, maybe we'd actually have a chance of making some progress.
The problem is, as I understand it: suppose some people locked themselves in their attic and worked on physics problems; how does society know that they're actually working on physics and not merely twiddling their thumbs?
The whole publication-review-credit-tenure-grant circuit was invented to address exactly that situation. In order to replace it, you need some other way of convincing the funding bodies that their money is actually paying for something.