During the latest meeting of my research group, a former member, Igor Pikovski, who is currently a professor in theoretical quantum physics at Stockholm University, described an innovative idea to detect single gravitons which he published in Nature magazine recently. When I asked him whether he encountered resistance to the idea, Igor replied: “Absolutely. Many scientists attacked the proposal and argued that it should be ignored.” A decade ago, one of the readers of Igor’s PhD thesis was Anton Zeilinger who received the Physics Nobel Prize in 2022 for research on quantum entanglement. Igor noted that for many years Anton’s work was underappreciated by his colleagues in Vienna. I added that the Physics Nobel laureate, Ray Weiss, told me a similar story about his colleagues at the MIT physics department who did not support his early work on detecting gravitational waves. A visiting student to this group meeting added that his novel idea was dismissed by a senior colleague recently, who argued that it should be ignored because it had not been worked out yet. I concluded the meeting by using my experience over the past forty years to explain the main obstacles for innovation in academia.
It is easy to train an artificial intelligence (AI) system on thinking within the box. But there is a very limited training set on how to innovate outside the box. A nuance on an existing theme resonates well within the large community of scientists engaged within the conventional paradigm. Such work does not require imagination and does not create any friction within the community. The small flowers it generates never rise above the grass levels. For these reasons, most astrophysicists find it comforting to discuss the conventional description of galaxies within the cold-dark-matter paradigm rather than explore the alternative of modified gravity with no dark matter, even though we had not unraveled the nature of dark matter since it was conjectured by Fritz Zwicky ninety years ago.
However, a novel idea outside the boundaries of what was imagined before does not resonate with any existing academic tribe and has less traction. For that reason, it is often ignored or dismissed. If the idea gains attention by rising above the grass level, zealots who are firm believers in the existing paradigm would do their best to cut its profile by either ridiculing it or arguing why it should not be pursued by others. Suppressing attention deters others from following-up to further examine the idea. This advocacy is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By silencing the messenger and discouraging future work on the subject, the academic zealots make sure that progress towards a possible paradigm shift would be delayed. This delay could be effective for generations, as demonstrated by the Vatican’s response to the cosmic heresy of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei. On October 31, 1992, about 359 years after placing Galileo in house arrest and 23 years after the Apollo 11 mission landed humans on the Moon, the Vatican formally admitted that Galileo was right.
Humans enjoy the sense of belonging to a tribe because it relieves them from the hard labor of critical thinking and provides them with a broad support system of like-minded tribe members. If one tribe member raises doubts about the tribe’s unifying narrative and threatens to leave, the response is loud and clear. To suppress the emergence of more doubters, the tribe attacks heresy as an existential threat to its integrity. Affording legitimacy to doubters would imply that the tribe might be headed in the wrong direction. As a matter of self-preservation, all doubters are cancelled. Tribal dynamics is prevalent in political or religious tribes but similarly so in academic tribes.
How could we overcome those who are not imaginative enough to tolerate academic innovation? First, by only playing chess because mud wrestling gets us dirty. Innovators must ignore personal attacks, non-professional criticism or superficial pushback. It also helps to have political strength and the protection by power brokers. Tenure in academia was invented for exactly that purpose. Most importantly, one must maintain course and pursue evidence and rational thinking rather than seek validation from temporary accolades, prizes or awards. The final verdict is set by nature itself, not humans. Let me illustrate this lesson with a historical anecdote.
In the Mayan culture, astronomers held the highest societal status: astronomer-priests. However, this status was based on the wrong paradigm: astrology. The political leaders sought their advice on whether to go to wars based on the relative positions of planets and stars in the sky. There must have been critics in the Mayan society who argued that this wishful-thinking paradigm is wrong and unsubstantiated. Listening to them could have saved wasted resources and human lives in the Mayan society. If critics were listened to, the data collected by the astronomer-priests could have led to the development of Newtonian gravity.
The final arbitrator is nature, not humans. Irrespective of how many accolades or awards are given by theoretical physicists to each other with no experimental validation, the correct recipe for unifying quantum mechanics and gravity may be very different from the one imagined in their abstract mathematics.
At the end of my group meeting, I suggested to Igor a novel way to use his latest work for the purpose of probing quantum gravity after the Big Bang. I noted cynically: “Lets collaborate on a paper about this novel idea. We now know how to shield our mind so as to avoid bruises from our colleagues.” While saying that, I thought to myself: “What a shame. This is not the academic culture that I signed for when I chose to become a scientist.”
But there is hope for a better future. The wiring of 140 thousand neurons with 54.5 million synapses in the brain of a fruit fly was just mapped in a Nature article this week. This led me to imagine that perhaps we would have had better scientific practice if the human brain had more than 86 billion neurons with 100 trillion synaptic connections. Once the human brain will be augmented with additional connections from AI systems, the combination might advance scientific discoveries at a faster pace. As I noted in a recent Fast-Company interview, we could accomplish this goal as long as we stop feeding AI the junk food from the internet. AI will do better once it deviates from being a digital mirror of our tribes. Let AI exit our tribal thinking and see how far it goes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
