(no subject)

I keep hearing people proposing ideas that sound, roughly, like "back in the 19th century people were revolutionising scientific fields every other week working alone or with a handful of assistants, now we don't do that even with huge teams of scientists working together, therefore we need to [read the classics/bring back the aristocracy/whatever other thing 19th century scientists did we don't do any more]"

and y'know i'm not gonna declare that 21st century scientific practice has no problems. but it seems to me that if there's One Weird Trick (or N weird tricks) that let you become the modern-day equivalent of Darwin or Maxwell or Laplace then surely someone out there would be doing that? even if the entire scientific apparatus is broken there's people outside it who are curious about things and free to do whatever they want; some of them are already rich and don't need to work for a living and so have all the free time required. Why aren't those people unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity?

I know what my answer is: because unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity is hard, and for the most part all the things that are easy to discover already have been and we're left with the stuff that requires a dozen people working together, or a budget to build a giant particle accelerator, or a huge scientific community exploring conceptspace in parallel.

You can say "yeah, it doesn't work if you're outside the scientific establishment entirely, you need access to some institutional resources, but the people who do have those resources could do a lot better" but at that point it kind of seems like you're admitting that doing science did get harder since the 19th century, not because people are doing it wrong but because we're answering different questions, and if so then the appeal of "well it worked back then" vanishes and you have to argue for your proposal on merits other than its 19th century track record.

(alternatively you can declare that they have gotten amazing results and our scientific process is so broken that not only are we unable to discover things but also if someone had a unified theory of everything and published it without institutional affiliation nobody would acknowledge it even to plagiarise it. i am sceptical but you can)