Last year a professor in my department (astronomy) suggested that he and I write a similar tongue-in-cheek paper to be published on April 1. The idea was to promote a moratorium on new astronomical data for one year. This would give observers time to reduce all the data they've already collected and theorists time to catch up to the observers.<p>It's facetious, of course, but there was a serious point behind it all. There is a certain tendency in science for a researcher to perform the same study over and over again just using larger or slightly modified data sets simply because that's what he knows how to do. Most of the time these sorts of Version 2.0 studies just reduce the error bars on the result without telling anyone anything new.<p>Now, of course, sometimes interesting results do come from such things. But much more often interesting results come from studies that attack a radically different problem or use a radically different approach. Science is a manpower-limited, not data-limited endeavor. Scientists have a finite amount of time that they can devote to research and they have to choose what projects to work on. There is still a great deal of low-hanging fruit---projects that require relatively small amounts of funding, relatively small amounts of manpower, and have the potential to yield genuinely new results. There are, for example, some really excellent projects that are being done with a telescope that basically consists of putting a commercial camera lens on a telescope mount [1]. But the difficulty of these sorts of projects is that they require creativity, and that is hard to come by. I'm not faulting anyone, though---I'm not an especially creative researcher myself!<p>Part of the problem is that grant agencies have a strong bias towards funding incremental science. While they say that they are in favor of funding breakthrough science rather than incremental science, the projects that actually get funded tell a different story. And it's hard to blame them because no one knows a good way to predict breakthrough results. It's an especially difficult problem to solve for theorists---in order to write a compelling theory proposal you basically have to have solved the problem already!<p>I've heard a number of solutions to these problems, but they're all as compelling to me as a year-long data moratorium (which, to be fair, would indeed force the community to become more creative). Hmm, maybe I'll actually write up that paper for April 1, 2015.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~assassin/index.shtml</a>