Below the Surface: Creep, Corrosion, and Tipping Points in the Social Resilience of Science
Abstract
By its most visible quantitative metrics: numbers of researchers, papers, journals, and institutions, science has never looked healthier. Yet a set of subsurface indicators points the other way: the disruptiveness of the average paper and patent is falling, progress slows in the largest fields, replication is rare and often unsuccessful. Incentive systems can select for poor methods even when no one is actually cheating. Lay society shows a curious mixture of admiration and lack of trust for scientists and their work. We argue that a healthy-looking surface can coexist with, and mask, an accumulation of below-the-surface damage due to slow-acting, internally and externally driven pressures, weakening the social position of science. This process is best understood not as an acute shock but as a creeping crisis. And while the damage grows slowly, it may result in a sudden collapse of the research as social institution. To make this diagnosis tractable rather than merely alarming, we import the conceptual and mathematical apparatus of two mature research fields that already study such slow degradation and sudden collapse processes: the continuum damage mechanics of creep, fatigue, and corrosion, and the ecology of resilience, regime shifts, and critical transitions. We do not claim to resolve whether science is merely robust under strain or is approaching a tipping point; the available data are too fragmentary. This remains a question of importance and we propose what would answer it: finding measurable early-warning indicators, use of agent-based models of the coupled trust-incentive-funding feedback system, understanding adversarial attacks, and the design of resilience building and recovery interventions. The result is a research agenda, and an argument for why the health of science cannot be read off its own success reports.
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BibTeX
@misc{sobkowicz2026below,
title = {{Below the Surface: Creep, Corrosion, and Tipping Points in the Social Resilience of Science}},
author = {Pawel Sobkowicz},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.22863},
eprint = {2609.22863},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22863},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Below the Surface: Creep, Corrosion, and Tipping Points in the Social Resilience of Science
AU - Pawel Sobkowicz
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.22863
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22863
AB - By its most visible quantitative metrics: numbers of researchers, papers, journals, and institutions, science has never looked healthier. Yet a set of subsurface indicators points the other way: the disruptiveness of the average paper and patent is falling, progress slows in the largest fields, replication is rare and often unsuccessful. Incentive systems can select for poor methods even when no one is actually cheating. Lay society shows a curious mixture of admiration and lack of trust for scientists and their work. We argue that a healthy-looking surface can coexist with, and mask, an accumulation of below-the-surface damage due to slow-acting, internally and externally driven pressures, weakening the social position of science. This process is best understood not as an acute shock but as a creeping crisis. And while the damage grows slowly, it may result in a sudden collapse of the research as social institution. To make this diagnosis tractable rather than merely alarming, we import the conceptual and mathematical apparatus of two mature research fields that already study such slow degradation and sudden collapse processes: the continuum damage mechanics of creep, fatigue, and corrosion, and the ecology of resilience, regime shifts, and critical transitions. We do not claim to resolve whether science is merely robust under strain or is approaching a tipping point; the available data are too fragmentary. This remains a question of importance and we propose what would answer it: finding measurable early-warning indicators, use of agent-based models of the coupled trust-incentive-funding feedback system, understanding adversarial attacks, and the design of resilience building and recovery interventions. The result is a research agenda, and an argument for why the health of science cannot be read off its own success reports.
ER -