Science is slowing down because scientists write papers and papers and more papers, not to achieve scientifical progress, but to achieve a better university-ranking.

We succesfully created a system encourages mediocrity and discourages novelty.

The big problem here is a significant shift in funding towards marketable products and ideas. A perfect example, the CSIRO (commonwealth science and research organization) was doing hard research into black holes when they developed wifi (Fourier transformation technique). That same organization has now had a total shift to 'work with and support industry' and would never have made that same breakthrough with their current focus and funding focus. It's why we have better things but less actual scientific innovation. Same thing is happening across the research sector.

science without the philosophy of science made it not much of a warm environment for thinkers. When you look at most of the best scientists, they were very good at philosophy, reasoning and formal logic. The separation of sciences has really played its role, hindering the creation of polymaths

another hypothesis is we've picked most of the low hanging fruit. it only gets harder from here.

Former researcher here. You get funding for publishing tons of paper and sticking to the status quo. If you challenge the status quo without very powerful backing, you don’t get funding and your career dies. Speaking as someone who had a paper killed by by Michel Mayor because the results threatened funding for the espresso spectrograph. I was right though

When everyone's got a Masters = nobody's got a Masters.

Reminds me of the stagnation in popular music, art and fashion - my take: creativity requires being mentally 'off the grid' for some time, reduced media consumption, long walks and long showers. Groundbreaking ideas can neither be forced nor planned. They come, when the mind is in a dream-like, distracted state. Of course, you have to burden your memory with a lot of very specific factual and conceptual information first. And you need enough sleep.

As a young scientist struggling to survive in science, I can point to three things that are killing it:

In my postdoctoral experience in theoretical evolutionary biology, it seems like science is often driven by ego, especially among senior investigators, who would rather be "right" than know the truth.

As I am currently in the center of the paper treadmill in electrochemistry, I am not surprised. As a PhD, you try to get things working that your big boss has barely thought about for 10 minutes, and then they insist it has to work with their materials, just because of their ego. I am actively sabotaged to work on something that is truly competitive or new because it only should work with our stuff. Obviously, it doesn't, and you try to find workarounds to get your damned papers published and this stories are never groundbreaking. And yes of course it's getting harder to find something. 1906 you can get a noble price for the isolation of fluorine. It's not that easy these days.

As an independent researcher so far I paid my own research, and conference fees. In a course of 20 years I witnessed increase in prices of everything related to research, and simultaneously the increase in pressure to publish. It all boils down to the only people publishing papers are those in the business of printing papers that can afford it. Naturally, instead of two groundbreaking ideas being published in a single paper, a single publishable idea is being published in many conferences.

I work in the biomedical industry or at least I am trying to. The problem in my field is 3 fold: 1. innovative thinkers are punished and excommunicated from the field, 2. scammers game the system and have the appearance of productivity and lots of papers that are either redundant/obsolete, falsified, or side details rather than useful for breakthroughs, 3. dishonesty when raising capital poisoning the well for people with good ideas that are feasible and valuable.

As an ex-academic, my vote is for option 3. The publication industry coupled with managerialism have established a set of incentives for scientists that align poorly with discovery and knowledge generation. Amusingly, there were a number of social science papers published in the 70s (i think) that predicted this... And here we are.

Something else worth mentioning is that the farther the field progresses, the more challenging it becomes to 'catch up' to the state of the art and make contributions

Basically, making science nowadays is more effective if you are the DIY-superman and you are not interested in getting any funds from anybody. My friends from Wrocław city salvaged tons of equipment from trash and bankrupt companies, scavenging what they can, eventually they even aqquired 30yo electrone microscope on a junkyard, refurbished it and now they're gonna start their own research. Writing scientific papers is waste of time - it's better to have youtube channel nowadays, gather small community of interested people and publish one bonkers paper every few years.

Born too early for space exploration, born too late for exciting scientific breakthrough, born at right time to enjoy meme.

I just left academia after a PhD, I think another part of it is that, at least in ecology, research councils aren't in the habit of funding work that could be groundbreaking as they view it as too risky/ a high likelihood of wasted money. Calls for funding are often highly tied to something we already know a lot about and applying it to a different scale or location.

I'm just a small mechanical engineer, not a scientist, but I noticed something similar in my field.

Why would these three be the only choices? How about the fact that what we are currently studying require more and more expensive tools because they get further from our everyday scale? Or not having armies actively funding new ways to kill each other thereby having less actual money for research relative to our needs? Why raise two obviously false answers to one possible one but leave other plausible answers unexplored?