About

The history of science is a winding and wondrous path filled with distinguished characters, fascinating stories, and startling ambition, shaped over time by many different ways of seeing and engaging with the world.

Beneath this history sits a constant driver of inquiry, our primitive instinct to make sense of the natural world. It is the urge to recognize patterns, construct causal stories, and orient ourselves within experience, and it has guided human inquiry across history, long before formal disciplines or institutions gave it structure.

As this instinct expresses itself over time, it takes on form through culture, language, and tools, gradually becoming a vast and fluid enterprise. Ideas rise and fall, paradigms intersect, and argument, rhetoric, and interpretation all contribute to what we come to understand as knowledge.

Heterodox Research Society was founded to engage with this broader view of science, one that recognizes its plurality and its fundamentally human character.

In the post-war era, the institutionalization of science introduced structure, scale, and coordination at an unprecedented level. At the same time, a gradual narrowing took place. A particular interpretation of a universal scientific method became dominant, and institutional incentives increasingly favored safety, repeatability, and legibility, often at the expense of exploration and speculation.

Over time, this has produced a form of methodological ossification.

The effects can be seen in the structure of modern research. Scientific activity has expanded dramatically, with more researchers, more funding, and an exponential increase in published work.

Looking beyond volume and toward substance, a different pattern begins to appear. The number of researchers required to produce meaningful advances has grown, and output per researcher and per dollar spent has declined in many areas.

"You see an exponential growth of scientific papers. So by that metric, you'd say things have never been better. The absolute number of researchers and engineers has never been larger. And even in proportion to the population, the fraction is also extremely large, has been booming. But when you look at the content, the substance of these papers, I could summarize in a bit of a pejorative way by saying these papers are mostly about well-dressed trivia. In many disciplines, in order to have the next increment, you need five or 10 times more researchers. So what we see is the production per dollar spent per researcher has been really decreasing. So that's clear; all metrics show this." — Didier Sornette, ETH Zurich

This reflects a structural condition within the system of science itself, and suggests a drift away from the more open and exploratory terrain upon which it historically developed.

Our aim is to engage with the culture of science and help shape a future that is both aware of and grounded in its past.

We seek to create space for forms of inquiry that have been neglected or dismissed, to encourage flexibility in method, and to support individuals and small groups operating both within and outside traditional structures.

We are interested in science not only as a body of knowledge, but as a living and evolving practice.

From this, new laboratories can emerge, new approaches to experimentation can take shape, and the pursuit of understanding can remain open to those willing to engage with it.