Progress is slowing down: why is contemporary science at an impasse?

Over the past fifty years, the pace of scientific development has been slowing down. In everyday life, this trend is not yet apparent, as it often takes decades for a fundamental discovery to be translated into practical technology. However, this slowdown has persisted for too long, which means we will soon face a broader deceleration in technological advancement. Naked Science has decided to provide a translation of a video by physicist and science popularizer Sabine Hossenfelder on this topic. What is wrong with modern science, and is there a way to address it?

2024-12-01 10:00:18https://naked-science.ru/article/nakedscience/zamedleniye

In an ideal world, popular science showcases science at its finest: it is evolving rapidly, with significantly more researchers and scientific work than half a century ago. However, in purely scientific circles, the discussions are quite different. In particle physics, everyone acknowledges in informal settings that since the prediction of the Higgs boson, there have been no breakthroughs in this field. The situation is not much better, if not worse, in many other areas (at least they found the Higgs boson after about fifty years).

More and more researchers are linking the issues with the slowdown in fundamental science development to the grant system. In its current form, it encourages scientists to tackle topics that do not interest them but are sufficiently trendy to attract funding from society. Consequently, scientists often work on subjects they are not passionate about, leading to a lack of significant progress in their research. Their potential is largely underutilized, a rarity that was not the case back in the 1960s.

Sabine Hossenfelder (Sabina Hossenfelder), a theoretical physicist until recently and now a science communicator, has conducted a review of this situation in a separate video. We have translated it and present it to you: