Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't found nothing. They've found something, which is nothing. They've looked, been able to rule out some hypotheses of what they might find, and have established some evidence against others. Progress achieved, and the search continues.
This. This author, who should know better, is suggesting that the only "success" is a new discovery. This is patent nonsense. Every time a hypothesis is ruled out, and every time a hypothesis is ruled out with greater confidence, the experiment has succeeded. What is true is that discoveries drive public excitement and public support for additional funding. That is a political problem and it is solvable. If Western g…
Is it solvable? Humans are notoriously bad at certain things and investing in things that aren't showing interesting results is one of them. How many companies will cut something that prevents problems because they don't see problems?
If you want to solve this, you would need to do it the same way the MIC has solved military funding, by ensuring continued funding of science is necessary for politicians to be re-elected. But that borders close enough to corruption I'm not sure the scientists who need the funding will be agreeable to it, to say nothing of the difficulty engineering this.