The goal of science is to find out how things work.
A few people are fortunate enough to be able to make a living that way, but for the most part scientists are caught up in the search for ways to keep their grant money coming in. This means generating sciency sounding papers which have results that please the funding agency.
If any actual science gets done in the process, that is purely coincidental for most people who call themselves scientists.
“…for the most part scientists are caught up in the search for ways to keep their grant money coming in.”
What I call “Grantologists”.
That’s an inconvenient and unfortunate truth today. No wonder there is a surge of scientific papers all over the world… lots and lots of garbage funded by the governments and other agencies everywhere, unfortunately.
That is also an important factor for the slowness of the advancement of true science presently, just look back 100 years to have an idea of how slow/almost stopped we’re now in comparison with what true science was doing back then.
How many fundamental discoveries like Relativity or Q. Physics have we made in the last decades? OTOH, we have lots of Nobel Prizes and an immense flow of cash to “science” that would probably shock Einstein and friends 100 years ago… maybe that’s the social price we must pay for not doing world wars anymore. 🙂
Funny you should mention world wars…I would say, stay tuned, but the reality is we are already in World War III. This insanity is part of it, and has been building since Malthus and Darwin, both of whom were doubt-filled clergymen, at heart (I mention this, because the underlying problem the world faces is the eager reliance on easy dogmas — that is what the climate consensus is, essentially — and the only thing worse than an easy dogma is leaders who are committed to them, but doubtful, and thus prone to lying to the public to give themselves some backbone…and it never works, except to create division and war).
I wonder if there is a way to determine the patent to PHD ratio in the USA? My guess is that the ratio is dropping.