Mayan astronomy had too much maths, not enough science

Unfortunately the Mayans had used their exquisite astronomical data within a mythological culture of astrology that rested upon false but mathematically sophisticated theories about the Universe. They collected unprecedented amounts of precise astronomical data... but failed to come up with the breakthrough ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton.

Popular strategy in funding science currently guides the allocation of most of the Astronomy Division funds at the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to major facilities and large scale surveys. The focus is clearly on large team efforts to collect better data within the mainstream paradigms of Astronomy, under the assumption that good science will follow.

As I (and many others) have written before (e.g. http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/10/false-consensus.html), an over-emphasis on big science is dangerous. But you do need big projects to answer some questions. So what you want is a mix of big and small groups. Big groups are better at making very precise measurements, or answering very narrow questions with carefully stated assumptions. Smaller groups and individuals are better at innovative thinking but it's harder for them to reach the same level of precision and accuracy. If you have too much of either, you might be in trouble.

I noticed this bias from close distance recently while serving on the PhD thesis committee of a student who was supposed to test whether a particular data set from a large cosmological survey is in line with LCDM; when a discrepancy was found, the goal of the thesis shifted to explaining why the data set is biased and incomplete. How can LCDM be ruled out in such a scientific culture? Observers should strive to present their results in a theory-neutral way rather than aim to reinforce the mainstream view.

Well, observers are going to have their own biases just like everyone else. What you want to do is make the data publically available as much as financially possible - ideally at the raw, unprocessed level, but at least at the level of the reduced, human-readable level. But yeah, if someone goes looking to say, "how does this data support my conclusion ?" rather than "what conclusion does this data support ?" then they're not really doing science at all.

Given the strong sociological trends in the current funding climate of team efforts, how could we reduce the risk of replicating the indoctrinated Mayan astronomy? The answer is simple: by funding multiple approaches to analyzing data and multiple motivations to collecting new data. After all, the standard model of cosmology is merely a precise account of our ignorance: we do not understand the nature of inflation, the nature of dark matter or dark energy. Our model has difficulties accounting for what we see in galaxies (attributed often to complicated “baryonic physics”), while at the same time not being able to see directly what we can easily calculate (dark matter and dark energy). The only way to figure out if we are on the wrong path is to encourage competing interpretations of the known data.

Funding agencies should promote the analysis of data for serendipitous (nonprogrammatic)purposes. When science funding is tight, a special effort should be made to advance not only the mainstream dogma but also its alternatives. To avoid stagnation and nurture a vibrant scientific culture, a research frontier should always maintain at least two ways of interpreting data so that new experiments will aim to select the correct one. A healthy dialogue between different points of view should be fostered through conferences that discuss conceptual issues and not just experimental results and phenomenology, as often is the case currently. These are all simple, off-the-shelf remedies to avoid the scientific misfortune of the otherwise admirable Mayan civilization.

Not sure I'd describe the Mayan's quite so favourably... the difficulty, of course, is promoting a dialogue between points of view which are genuinely controversial (is galaxy formation all due to mergers or something else ?) and those which have already been well and truly refuted (does the Earth really orbit the Sun ?). Too much open-mindedness is as bad as too little (http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2015/10/not-so-open.html). Then again, I'm generally happy with the state of things as they are. In particular I see a lot of senior professors who are all too happy to consider radically different alternatives (dark matter doesn't exist ! it's all baryons ! the universe isn't really expanding !). Conferences which are largely limited to discussing incremental experimental results are in the minority, in my experience.

Disclaimer : Avi is a co-I on my VLA proposal to observe dark HI clouds. We postulate three different models to test, but as I've said before, observations normally tell you something completely different from what you expected. Can't imagine any halfway-decent observer who would say, "these observations don't support my ideas, therefore they must be wrong", although see also http://astrorhysy.blogspot.cz/2016/05/nemesis.html
http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01731