[mellosouls]

From the same paper, I'm not sure this passage helps its case. It seems off-topic, and rather breathless in it's speculation, although I respect their positive imagination:

An entirely different yet equally fascinating possibility would be that, in an abstract sense, the scientific community itself can be interpreted as a thermodynamic ensemble. In this line of thinking, the individual members would be subject to a Boltzmann distribution in “curiosity” associated with a “temperature” determining how likely each researcher is to carry out research more or less closely tethered to a specific area of interest. In turn, a type of entropy could be associated with the amount of information contained in this ensemble, or exchanged between sufficiently large subsets of it. If correct, the implications would be truly profound, and could reshape the future direction of science in ways never before imagined. Understanding the mechanisms with which to influence the “curiosity temperature” would allow wise policy makers to implement suitable conditions that foster scientific progress, and usher in a new era of discovery...[goes on at length]