At Not Even Wrong, Peter Woit notes,
In this week’s Nature, Abraham Loeb, the chair of the Harvard astronomy department, has a column proposing the creation of a web-site that would act as a sort of “ratings agency”, implementing some mathematical model that would measure the health of various subfields of physics. This would provide young scientists with more objective information about what subfields are doing well and worth getting involved with, as opposed to those which are lingering on despite a lack of progress. Guess what Loeb’s main example is of the “lingering on” category?
Hey, we won’t spoil your fun by stringing you along until you become all strung out … Read it here
It won’t work unless there are some serious iconoclasts involved.