Newton was ridiculed by his peers (or at least his contemporaries). Part of the reason why people tell the story of Halley convincing Newton to publish the Prin

Newton was ridiculed by his peers (or at least his contemporaries). Part of the reason why people tell the story of Halley convincing Newton to publish the Principia is that Newton hadn't published anything after the reception of some of his early work on optics. For example, one of Newton's observations was that the spectrum cast by a prism he'd bought at a local fair was elongated. Being Newton, and therefore given to extreme of care, he had arranged the prism in a room that was about twenty feet long and was struck by sunlight coming through a pinhole in a shutter. This is not a simple thing to arrange, and because the Earth is rotating the correct geometry lasts quite a short time. But it allowed him to see the elongation of the spectrum. The problem was that received wisdom said the spectrum should be circular, as it was cast by a circular beam. Some of the replies to Newton's paper were on the order of, "Well, I held up a prism and took a quick look and it seemed ciruclar to me! Mr Newton is a fool." Science is always going to be like this. People are mostly idiots (I certainly am, most of the time.) But the author's point is that it is worse now, and that the institutional incentives that make it worse are pretty clear. Get a couple of beer into an older scientist and they'll often tell you that they couldn't have gotten an academic position in the current climate. Furthermore, similar incentives are in play all over the world--althouhg a friend in the Far East tells me things are better there because universities are still trying to build reputations so they are engaged in more fundamental research rather than just grant-writing. Given this, and given we depend on science to solve some of our biggest problems, and given we have a lot of smart, passionate, dedicated people going into the sciences to solve those problems, an institutional structure that fails to deliver on the promise of giving those people a meaningful career solving problems that matter is a serious problem for Enlightenment civilization.