[curiousllama]

> Science would become something like a parlor game. Some things would be considered interesting, others not. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants. Those who wouldn’t would not, and pretty soon they would learn to follow the fashion, too.

Have fashions taken over? What was science like before fashions took over?

[everybodyknows]

> What was science like?

The tyranny of the tenured elderly:

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” ― Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers

[throw_pm23]

It was what Szilard, von Neumann, Feynman, and others were doing.

[dtech]

not an insider, but apparently it's almost impossible to get funding in (theoretical?) physics outside outside of quantum mechanics.

[scythe]

I assume that what you're trying to say is that it's almost impossible to get funding in fundamental physics outside of string theory, which at least might be true. There are lots of people with funding in theoretical (or at least computational) physics who aren't doing quantum mechanics, like nearly all of astrophysics, much of acoustics and fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics, etc.

[varjag]

String theory has been out of fashion for at least a decade.

[Thrymr]

What part of modern theoretical physics is "outside" quantum mechanics? General relativity, sure, but arguably the most interesting problem there is how to make it compatible with quantum mechanics.