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Truth, Ownership, and the Scientific Tradition
number6x writes "The Physics Today website has an article by Robert Laughlin titled "Truth, Ownership, and the Scientific tradition". The article deals with some recent blunders in the scientific community like the falsification of data at lucent covered here on slashdot. The article is mainly about the conflict between the free exchange of ideas that the scientific community needs to survive, and the demand for property ownership that commercial sponsors demand."
what would happen if the next Einstein comes along and demonstrates that cold fusion is possible, clean and safe... but is sponsored by Exxon?
Obviously, Exxon would then shift their focus to Cold Fusion, lock everone out of the industry via way of patents and bs intellectual property, and they would pretty much have a monopoly on energy production in the end.
Dispite what most people think the oil industries AREN'T out to kill all other forms of energy production. They just want to make sure that by the time the oil DOES run out they are the ones that own the new source.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I found it fascinating that at only one place in the article, buried at the end of a long and complex paragraph did the author use the terms lies. He frequently used euphemisms such as "creative", but only once he did directly refer to dishonesty. Yet in the end, this sort of scientific smoke is simple dishonesty at its core. Only when a man chooses to surrender his personal integrity, do these problems occur. Our attempt to color them with quiet shades of pastel only makes the behavior more likely.
What does this say about our culture in general and the effect on our scientific community?
With the rise of "corporate universities" and corporate science the drive has been to be more accountable.
Corporate universities are a byproduct of today's corporate society where the emphasis is on money - earning, spending, getting, justifying spending other people's, etc.
The problem has filtered down to universities - because they spend public money (ie. taxes), that money has to be justified. You simply can't justify academia in monetary terms, and so universities have had to change. But that change has been brought on by the public demand that government be accountable and transparent (and so it should be).
The other big problem is that more and more government funding is being cut. The only other avenue for funding is sponsorship by corporate entities who won't sponsor research that doesnt have a product they can make money from (because the companies are accountable themselves), and the problem will continue to spiral downwards.
The real problem here is the money counters trying to put a monetary value on research [output]. In a similar vein, the reason that publication is so out of control now (ie. the emphasis is on getting as many publications as possible) is that people thought this was a good way to measure academic output.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example.
Along the same lines:
In my experience, it is extremely rare to find a journal/conference publication that includes enough information in the methods section to allow others to either check or verify the work or use the findings themselves. Vital information is almost always missed out - it's an artifial intellectual property control, and, as the parent post says, makes it easier for data to be faked.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
"Do I see some bitterness in the physics community? It is seen nowadays as very important for humanity to spend more money on the life sciences and less on physics. And the physics guys do not like it!
Tough."
I think you are breathing too much into the statement you're referring to. What physicists are annoyed at is that their research interests are soley judged by the potential amount of money it can make. Physics has a long tradition of basing itself on the pursuit of knowledge, and more importantly, the truthfulness of that knowledge. Replacing "academic interest" with "potential revenue" has many adverse effects, of which some are appearing now. The issue is not about how much money physics gets, but what is being used to justify research.
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results. I do not know if this is true, but it would be not be surprising -- biological systems are much more complex and harder to control.
I fully agree with the author of the Physics Today article that the corporatisation of universities is quite dangerous.
if you carefully read lauglin's essay, one of the things he laments is the secrecy behind which coorporate sponsored research takes place. i suppose it would be redundant to mention that the elimination of this secrecy is what patents and copyrights were originally designed to prevent.
patents, exclusive licenses to new inventions, are granted for the sole purpose of encouraging inventors to publish, in full detail, their inventions. without patent protection, for example, texas instruments and fairchild semiconductor may not have ever told anyone how to make an integrated circuit. they would have made the first chips under a cloak of secrecy, sold them as black box devices, and bury the chips in epoxy to protect the secret.
unfortunately, industry, the lawmakers, and even the courts have forgotten the whole idea of patents is to publish. industry wants to call patents property that should belong to the holder and anything that weakens the patent is the equivalent of a 'taking'. congress and the patent office are all to happy to agree. and the courts have screwed the matter up further by taking the position that engineers and inventors are not legally qualified to decide if they are infringing on a patent, and so are not allowed to even look at one when trying to come up with new inventions.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
The author was of the opinion that the life sciences are not as rigorous in testing the veracity of research results.
Very true. But biology is where physics was at the time of Newton. Each big science domain is doing what it can with what it has. I don't think that applying a physics point of view to just life sciences or any other scientific domain is right.
I suspect the author of the article would agree with you. I think the argument isn't so much "let's be very rigorous to prove that we are better than the biologists." It's more that physicis is no longer the premiere cutting edge technological science as it was in the 20th century; increasingly, biology is taking up that mantle. Instead of continuing as an also-ran has-been, the author seems to be proposing that physicists change their attitude to try and distinguish themselves as useful and productive in a different philosophical area, an area that much of the biological sciences probably won't really be strongly pushing into for at least a few decades.
Mind you, I personally think that applying a (fill in the blank scientific) point of view is right, almost always. However, you then need to evaluate how useful that exercise was. Not performing the excercise out of some sense of "not right" is just as harmful as refusing to make progress in biology because the field can't currently live up to physics standards of rigor. Keep an open mind in both directions; apply as many reasonable scientific perspectives as you can to see if you learn anything in the process.
-Rob