Reporting on non-mainstream ideas in science is often skewed on either side, presenting them as either rare/revolutionary or totally suppressed.
In practice, there are a ton of people working on ideas their colleagues look at & say "eh, a bit niche" that might/might not pan out.
In practice, there are a ton of people working on ideas their colleagues look at & say "eh, a bit niche" that might/might not pan out.
We don't invest en masse in the fringe ideas unless they pass enough rigorous tests to become the new consensus, but no one is saying "you can't publish on that." The vast majority of papers on ALL topics are ignored; the more extraordinary the claim, the more evidence it needs.
Not sure why I’m going on about this so much lately. I just think it’s important for people to know that in between all the big flashy results there are a bunch of us just chugging along trying all different things (and getting excited or not) and that’s good and normal science.
In physics theory, at least, if you want to publish at all, you're either proposing new ideas, pushing the edges of our consensus models, or presenting novel support for an established idea. We literally can't write papers just saying "the consensus is correct!" without analysis.
In my experience the place where science-community pushback against "mavericks" tends to occur is where people with not-(yet?)-accepted ideas reach out to the media to claim that the reason their ideas aren't accepted (yet!) is that the rest of us are too stubborn/closed-minded.
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