Having worked in Eric Mazur’s lab briefly (on physics research, not education research), I can confirm that he is genuinely interested in helping students understand science in a way most professors - let alone high school or elementary school teachers, who often barely know the material to that level themselves - do not. I have also noticed that such ideas are far more common at the very top schools - and in more theoretical disciplines - than even in other high-ranking-but-still-not-very-top schools. Because, see, understanding concepts is hard. We didn’t evolve to visualize wavefunctions in Hilbert space. Practicing solving the equations is far easier to learn and to teach - and most research in the physical sciences - for good reason - consists of working out what the theories we already have actually mean in practice. Revolutions are rare because the existing theories are pretty good, and it takes a large balance of evidence to overrule them.
Is politics a problem? Yes, absolutely. As you and others pointed out, string theory is a particularly good example (and one of the reasons I chose not to go into theoretical physics). Do funding agencies have a status quo bias? Usually, because those projects naturally succeed more often. Personally, I left grad school (not at Harvard) because I didn’t like the environment of conformity - but that was an engineering program. Physics programs other than string theory don’t have that problem to the same degree, based on my firends’ experiences at other schools. I did notice that many of the smartest students left my program because they didn’t want to deal with the politics.
But although the institutions of science could work much better, they do work, in that they always move forward, even if not as fast as they could. But making such a change would also have costs. Today only high-ranking individuals are likely to get support for speculative projects, because they are more known and trusted. The wider you open those gates, the more “wasted” money on failed projects (not even counting cranks). What you’re suggesting seems to be that people who don’t even know what the current state of research is - what evidence it is based on, what other ideas were considered and rejected, why the discipline is pursuing a particular research direction - can swoop in and make insightful observations. This is occasionally true, but the signal to noise ration is enormous, and only worth researchers’ attention if carefully filtered.
