Dear MAGA: 20190430 Open Topic

“from politically motivated alarmists, like the ones who are ruining science in almost every field now.”
Wolf,
This is a great point. But sometimes there’s not even any political motivation visible.
Face it: we’ve got government-funded, socialist Big Science now, delivered by tenured profs, think tankers, and civil servants, and overseen by senior tenured profs, senior civil servants, and politicians. (viz: Maxine Waters overseeing NASA budget. What could go wrong?)
It just doesn’t work. Even when there isn’t a Commie agenda, socialism just doesn’t work.
We can look at it Big Picture: How much money has been spent on science, math, technology, and engineering research from 1913 until today?
How many people worked in the field during that time? How many man-years?
What percentage of them had Ph.D.’s?
What percentage of them had graduated from top prestigious institutions dedicated to science, math, engineering, etc.? CalTech, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Cambridge, Oxford, Ecole Polytechnique, ETH, Tokyo, etc.?
How many peer reviewed publications were there, each year, over that period?
How much has fundamental science been advanced in that time? (105 years, since the creation of the Fed, the destitution of the state governments’ control over the US Senate, and the institution of the income tax?)
Now, ask yourself exactly the same questions, but for the time span from 1813 (Napoleonic wars) to 1912 (sinking of the Titanic)?
By all the measures that science administrators consider relevant today, the Moderns should be killing the 19th Century guys on number of fundamental discoveries.
But I don’t see it.
Science advanced faster on a shoe string. Brain cells, hard work, and ability to seek funding in a free market economy count for more than sheepskin, paradigms, and much larger budgets doled out by bureaucrats (or spooks, in the case of Goolag & Fakebook.)
But we can also look at many small pictures: climate change, Big Bang cosmology, what is the deal with solar neutrinos?, when are physicists going to deal seriously with the fact that quantum entanglement theories and Einsteinian relativity seem to conflict?, abiotic origin of petroleum.
Even historical sciences like archaeology: Why won’t people publicly smash the failed “Arab Golden Age” paradigm? Or treat Neo-Pirennist thought and the Phantom Time Hypothesis seriously?
Wherever you look, the big names seem to be holding back people with valid ideas, or at least valid questions, from outside the accepted paradigm in each field.