The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences.
Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
I think you've got it from the wrong end. Most academic research I've seen has been so tainted by corporate funding, publish-or-perish haste, over-formalization, misuse of statistics, egos run wild, or some mixture of them all. Then there have been cases where novel research has been stomped into the ground by professional groupthink, like in Yudkin's case. At the same time we had guys like Shulgin being incredibly productive all on their own.
Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack.
Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.
This has nothing to do with what I said. I just implied sharing the costs for expensive equipment and consumables, what the out-of-academia scientists then do is up to them. I did not imply they are not independent.
But it is certainly close to impossible to coordinate without some kind of sci-funding.
Mostly picking at your last sentence. Even so. Once money starts sloshing around, the middlemen swoop in, the costs explode, what started as collaborative becomes institutional, and all of the institutional pathologies reinstate themselves.
If you are ever in Bath check out the Herschel museum. He was the guy who discovered Uranus, various comets, and other feats of astronomy. Music teacher by day, self-taught astronomer by night, including making the telescopes he needed, by hand, in the back room of his house.
Fast forward to today and you need a multi-billion-dollar orbital telescope or a massive array of radio telescopes to do new work...
> Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
The rate of major paradigm shifts needs to decrease over time. If it doesn't, then we're working in a scientific livelock or chasing after a moving goalpost.
> Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day)
It is assumed due to the higher knowlege and specialisation level that the world has these days, but such moments of change does not come along very often, and people have always been confident about how there is no way their understanding of the world might be severly lacking in some way. So it might just be that all is as it always has been you just have to look at it using a large enough time frame.
I've heard of a contemporary mathematician who had small contributions and did it as a hobby. The recent article about insect population decrease was possible thanks to data collected by hobbyists too iirc (but ended up written by scholars I guess). I don't know if there are many other examples.
Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).