Here’s a crazy idea. It’s way better to come up with our own questions, not just respond to the ones we’re given. It’s also way better to shape our own philosophical background conditions to fit the empirical evidence we have, instead of simply accepting existing philosophies.

In foundations (or maybe in other fields of physics as well), I observe a certain degeneracy in questions—i.e there are a handful of research questions the community engages with during an era , such as reconstructions, proving no-go theorems, GPT's, quantum reference frames etc and vast majority of papers written answer or discuss those questions and any given individual rarely ask (or allowed to ask!) their own questions outside the boudary of the main research questions of the community.

I think what’s best to share between researchers is the curiosity and discomfort about puzzling phenomena, informed by our shared knowledge of past experiments and theory, not the shared set of canonical questions. It’s mind-numbing to have a shared set of canonical questions. It’s like having a problem set from an instructor. Boring.

Letting people ask their own questions leads to a wider range of perspectives on the phenomena we study and discover.

History books seems to suggest that this trend is fairly recent, maybe starting after the mid-20th century.

If you look at earlier generations of physicists, the community might have focused on certain phenomena or experiments, but theoretical papers often posed their own original questions rather than just providing answers to known questions. There were parallel discoveries, but there wasn’t a set list of questions everyone was working on.

In most physics departments today, I think we see familiar research groups—such as AMO, condensed matter, HEP, or quantum information—asking well-known questions, including those about the standard model, dark matter, string theory, and no-go theorems yada yada. 

But if I had visited the physics department at Cambridge or Bern in 1910, there might have been someone like J.J. Thomson working on cathode rays, but there probably wasn't a 'electron research group' that could be copy pasted and found in every university. Research was often driven by a few individuals and their bold, sometimes unusual ideas. 

Back then, the image of a passionate, almost mad scientist working alone on a strange new question or experiment might have been accurate. Maybe they were like real life Frankensteins.

These scientists probably did interact with others, but it seems they had more freedom and individuality in the questions they asked and the philosophies they followed or invented. Part of this freedom came from not yet knowing what was impossible. We now know many things that impose strong constraints on what is possible and what is not. Still, that doesn’t mean we’ve lost the ability to ask our own questions. In fact, knowing what isn’t possible can help us ask better, more informed questions.

It’s not as if we’ve nearly finished a logic puzzle and only have a few pieces left, so there’s no room for new questions. That’s a (possibly wrong) epistemically closed-off view of science. 

We might always be facing an open-ended collection of knowledge and mysteries about the universe.

 Heck, even if there are only a few puzzles left, we can still show our individuality and voice in science in other ways—by creating new technologies, making art, or doing something else like stopping wars.