by btilly | 2025-10-08 19:18:43+00:00
I believe that this hypothesis is wrong.

More specifically, I believe that scientific research winds up dominated by groups who are all chasing the same circle of popular ideas. These groups start because some initial success produced results. This made a small number of scientists achieve prominence. Which makes their opinion important for the advancement of other scientists. Their goodwill and recommendations will help you get grants, tenure, and so on.

But once the initial ideas are played out, there is little prospect of further real progress. Indeed that progress usually doesn't come until someone outside of the group pursues a new idea. At which point the work of those in existing group will turn out to have had essentially no value.

As evidence for my belief, I point to https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/science-really-does-adva.... It documents that Planck's principle is real. Fairly regularly, people who become star researchers, wind up holding back further process until they die. After they die, new people can come into the field, pursuing new ideas, and progress resumes. And so it is that progress advances one funeral at a time.

As a practical example, look at the discovery of blue LEDs. There was a lot of work on this in the 70s and 80s. Everyone knew how important it would be. A lot of money went into the field. Armies of researchers were studying compounds like zinc selenide. The received wisdom was that galium nitride was a dead end. What was the sum contribution of these armies of researchers to the invention of blue LEDs? To convince Shuji Nakamura that if that was the right approach, he had no hope. So he went into galium nitride instead. The rest is history, and the existing field is lost.

Let's take an example that is still going on. Physicists invented string theory around 50 years ago. The problems in the approach are summed up in the quote that is often attributed to Feynman, *"String theorists don't make predictions, they make excuses." To date, string theory has yet to produce a single prediction that was verified by experiment. And yet there are thousands of physicists working in the field. As interesting as they found their research, it is unlikely that any of their work will wind up contributing anything to whatever future improved foundation is discovered for physics.

Here is a tragic example. Alzheimer's is a terrible disease. Very large amounts of money have gone into research for a treatment. The NIH by itself spends around $4 billion per year on this, on top of large investments from the pharmaceutical industry. Several decades ago, the amyloid beta hypothesis rose to prominence. There is indeed a strong correlation between amyloid beta plaques and Alzheimer's, and there are plausible mechanisms by which amyloid beta could cause brain damage.

After several decades of research, and many failed drug trials, support the following conclusion. There are many ways to prevent the buildup of amyloid beta plaques. These cure Alzheimer's in the mouse model that is widely used in research. These drugs produce no clinical improvement in human symptoms. (Yes, even Aduhelm, which was controversially approved by the FDA in 2021, produces no improvement in human symptoms.) The widespread desire for results has created fertile ground for fraudsters. Like Marc Tessier-Lavigne, whose fraud propelled him to becoming President of Stanford in 2016.

After widespread criticism from outside of the field, there is now some research into alternate hypotheses about the root causes of Alzheimer's. I personally think that there is promise in research suggesting that it is caused by damage done by viruses that get into the brain, and the amyloid beta plaques are left by our immune response to those viruses. But regardless of what hypothesis eventually proves to be correct, it seems extremely unlikely to me that the amyloid beta hypothesis will prove correct in the long run. (Cognitive dissonance keeps those currently in the field from drawing that conclusion though...)

We have spend tens of billions of dollars over several decades on Alzheimer's research. What is the future scientific value of this research? My bet is that it is destined for the garbage, except as a cautionary tale about how much damage it can cause when a scientific field becomes unwilling to question its unproven opinions.