Two Love Letters to a Science Struggling to Remember What Really Matters and the Unexpected Gift of the 2026 Hormuz Crisis

The first letter responds to Park and Suh’s article in Technological Forecasting and Social Change, which overlooks the role of serendipity in scientific discovery. It relies heavily on patent counts as indicators of technological contribution, ignoring their limitations. Of the roughly 50 million patents granted worldwide, most are, as The Economist puts it, an “intellectual junkyard” — ideas that never materialized, failed concepts, or filings with no real intent to succeed. Even high-profile failures illustrate this flaw: Theranos, one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious frauds, held over 100 patents and reached a $10 billion valuation. Empirical evidence reinforces the point: a large-scale study of 4,460 real-world innovations found that most were never patented, with patents capturing only about 15% of actual innovation.  https://zenodo.org/records/18951538

The second letter responds to Haunschild and Bornmann’s article in the Journal of Informetrics, which proposes a bibliometric method to identify “bright young scientists” based largely on publication counts in high-impact journals. This approach is not only flawed but likely to exacerbate existing distortions in science. Journal impact factors are aggregate metrics that cannot capture the quality, originality, or intellectual risk of individual work; using them as proxies for talent is a textbook ecological fallacy. More importantly, institutionalizing such criteria would intensify perverse incentives already at play. This proposal would accelerate hyperauthorship, strategic publishing, and superficial output. Far from identifying genuine talent, the proposed method risks systematically amplifying the very behaviors that undermine it. https://zenodo.org/records/19001905 

PS - The 2026 Strait of Hormuz energy crisis did what years of sustainability advocacy could not: it made Europe's dependence on fossil-based construction materials impossible to ignore. The paradox is almost elegant: it took a fossil fuel crisis to make the case for leaving fossil fuels behind, and in its wake, bio-based construction materials finally emerged from niche experiments to serious contenders, offering a tangible path toward a more resilient and low-carbon built environment. https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202604.0356