Science needs patience. Scientists can't be patient.

A Calabi-Yau manifold,
the standard picture you put on your poster
even if you've never used one.

A few days ago, a paper appeared in the free database that is commonly used in theoretical physics. It is a paper written by Gerald 't Hooft, professor at the Utrecht University, 1999 Nobel prize winner and father of the currently most studied topic in theoretical physics: the holographic principle. 

The paper is very nice not only because it is written to make the reader understand what is going on (and, trust me, most of the time this is not the case, a lot of people is afraid to look stupid if they explain some basic steps of their research), but also because it is extremely honest about it. To use the author's words

We come not even close to solving this problem, but we propose various ingredients in phrasing the questions, possibilities and limitations that may serve as starting points.

This is an even more rare feature to find in nowadays papers since over advertising (and I'm not talking about the title, titles are complicated) is a very common habit. There are days where 5 or 6 papers claim to contain groundbreaking physical considerations when almost always they just contain a calculation slightly different than the previous one.

The final paragraph of the paper is the reason why I decided to write a post about it. 

However, the road towards these solutions will consist of very small but mathematically precisely formulated steps in our way of thinking. String theory was an interesting guess, but may well have been a too wild one. We are guessing the mathematical structures that are likely to play a role in the future, but we fall short on grasping their internal physical coherence and meaning. For this, more patience is needed. 

It is my firm (and Utopian) opinion that if science could really be patient in these days, there will be a revolution beyond our imagination. But sadly we can't be patient. Young scientists, the core and the future of scientific production, are forced to move around every few months and people expect them to produce something in those few months. It thus happens that you settle for a minor publication, for which you spent more time to write it than to think about it.

I'm not saying that we should only publish groundbreaking papers, with deep scientific meaning, but we should build up a system where those paper are not lost in the daily noise. To understand this concept, just notice that the day of appearance of a very nice paper, other 25 were published that day in that field (47 if we consider different but related fields of physics and mathematics). You can throw a rock and find 5 papers whose scientific question is not oriented to understand how nature works, but rather consider some exotic theory in some exotic context. This happens every day, with the exception that the good paper is not usually present.

You can blame the scientists that are publishing almost everything is passing on their desks, but it is also easy to imagine why they feel confident with this habit. In a real world (not the one made of candies where we all want to live), you need to get founded to keep going, to move to the next contract, to apply for the next position. To get funded, you need to produce something because the committee (that is not composed by experts in your field, the experts are, by definition, a strong minority) has to confront you with other candidates. So you over advertise your work, you throw strong claims every now and then, you take small shortcuts that nobody will have the time to check and, more generally, you dress your shit like a princess and hope that it will be kissed by someone.

Sadly, patience is what science needs, but also what the vast majority of scientists can't afford if they want to survive the instability that this profession brings in their life. It is true that I can spend days, or months, or years, thinking about the building blocks of nature, but eventually I have to find the time to sit down and test my hypothesis. That second step is precisely what will make me a scientist, but if my day has to be dedicated to find the next grant, while I keep my name alive in the community with small publications, I will hardly find the time or the energies to do so. 

In conclusion, I couldn't agree more in what professor 't Hooft wrote in his paper and I think that everyone should follow his lesson (and his style in writing papers), but realistically I know that only senior staff members have the chance to apply that lesson. This is not very encouraging for the future of science since they are not the future of science.