Alex
Thank you so much AquaMartin (if that is your real name, LOL) for your kind comments! I am not sure what can be done to foster curiosity and the willingness to take risks in research. The funding mechanisms certainly don't encourage risk-taking, nor do they support scientists who are too far ahead of the pack in their thinking in accepted fields of study. That alone is a big problem.
But here I am talking about something bigger, where I am suggesting that scientists should be allowed to study things that we are not allowed to study---the things that we are told "everyone knows is nonsense." The fact is that many of these taboo phenomena have been studied by scientists, and it is not all nonsense. (One cannot prove something is nonsense!) How much more would we know about the universe and our place in it if we were allowed (by other scientists) to study these things?
Twenty years ago, I learned about earthquake lights (from NASA scientist Friedemann Freund) as well as a possible theoretical path toward earthquake prediction. To this day, the US Geological Survey states that the reality of earthquake lights is disputed and that the problem of earthquake prediction is unsolvable. Not only is earthquake prediction not funded, it is not taken seriously by the scientific community. You can't even publish a serious paper on the topic. Yet in those twenty years, a MILLION people have died from earthquakes. How is this not a SIN? At the very least it is a enormous failure on the part of the scientific community (a community which struggles daily to convince the public that their way of doing things is reliable).
I think that the path toward progress involves scientists adopting a dose of humility by accepting that there are things that we don't know. And in doing so, accepting that it is OK for SOME scientists to decide to study those things by applying the scientific method and sharing their findings with others. Should some of that research be funded? Certainly! But the first step is for the scientific community to ALLOW (even encourage) serious discourse on ALL TOPICS of serious inquiry.
Accepting that there are things we don't know is a first step.
Accepting that scientists don't handle anomalies well is a second step.
The purpose of this essay was to raise awareness of both of these facts in an attempt to compel scientists to do better.