I just realized a great many things about science, and can chalk them all up to this: A very large majority of scientists are simply incapable of doing proper research – science in the true sense of the word; in the sense that it was practiced by Galileo, Newton, Watson, and Crick.

So they write. They write and write, and produce mountains of garbage. This garbage is published because it’s become the status quo, and other researchers marvel at how much trash a particular researcher managed to spew out in a particular publication, or how many times this process has been repeated with a few words shuffled around.

When they find graduate students, bright young minds lacking only training, they train them to spew out more trash of their own (usually with the advisor’s name attached – this apprenticeship is not an altruistic one) so they’ll find good jobs as academics, where they can perpetuate the cycle.

The reason that science advances at all is because every so often, someone comes along who can (and, more importantly, will) think, who can experiment, and who actually had the freedom to do just that. This doesn’t take anything extraordinary – just patience, training, a small amount of intelligence, lots of time, and complete intellectual freedom.

But maybe that is extraordinary these days.