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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."
They won their PhDs fairly. They weren't honorary. The nature of science (for good or for ill) is that unless someone can disprove your work then yours is as good as anyone elses.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
One interesting element about these three chaps is that when they had their great ideas there was no way to make money from it so no-one is interested. What we are talking about here are experimental scientists where there is a direct effect of their work. "Blue sky" scientists were less prone to these problems in the past because companies tended not to fund them. With the rise of "corporate universities" and corporate science the drive has been to be more accountable.
Einstein didn't get funding for his research 100 years ago, what would happen if the next Einstein comes along and demonstrates that cold fusion is possible, clean and safe... but is sponsored by Exxon ?
The corporatisation of science means the ethics of corporations now apply. Science will have an "Enron" scenario within the next few years.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I appreciate this man's writing, he is thorough and insightful. His statements about the science world give you an idea about the "empirical" knowledge going around in the scientific community today, some slightly false and some completely fabricated.
I agree with his opinion on scientists under stress, for a paid scientist is just like any other working individual; mindful of their family and bills. He has done an excellent job of humanizing the average Joe scientist.
At that, I literally clapped when I got to the part about physics. He said what I've been saying all along, Physics is the Open Source of the science community.
Keep posting articles from this man, whoever is reading, I would like to see more of his work.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
From the article: "For a research investment to be justified, it must produce value equal to or greater than that of the investment."
I find this extremely questionable. History is full of scientific discoveries and ideas which were not able to produce equal or greater value for long time. Can anyone enlighten me about the value produced by Einstein's research?
So what happens when you get your PhD through these means, and then someone says "Well, nice work, but everything you've done is utter garbage, and you've made fools of an entire community." as was the case in this scenario?
As performance artists though, I give them the highest regard.
Does engineering eat science's crumbs, or does science serve engineering's beck and call?
Of course the two are inderdependent. To a huge majority of people, most of whom have some kind of say in how resources are allocated, the goals of the scientist, however, often seem esoteric and even blasphemous.
However, the goals of the engineer are very clear: envision, design, implement, sell. Cars, computers, bridges, perfume bottles, guns.
Which is more important, Ms. Voter, the Scientist or the Engineer? Now, don't go thinking too much!
(disclaimer: I'm an engineer)
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing
There you have it ``innovation'' == ``dishonesty''
Over to you, Microsoft ... :-)
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
In the seventies, I was a graduate student in zoology. I thought I saw a distinct change in culture occurring.
On the one hand you had people typified by older zoologists, who were gentlemanly academic putterers, studying animals and publishing papers. Their ambitions seemed to be a full professorship, continuously funded grants, support for their graduate students, and a bit more lab space.
On the other hand you had people typified by younger molecular biologists, who were hard-driving, competitive, and occasionally arrogant. Some of them gave me the impression that commercial success was in the back of their minds--maybe not even far in the back.
I don't mean to suggest this was a zoology-versus-molecular-biology thing. It was more a change in the zeitgeist. During the years I was a grad student I was certain that I was seeing science becoming more and more competitive.
You could see the "methods" sections in papers becoming shorter and more perfunctory, for example. I was aware of at least some cases in which scientists guarded some of their techniques because they WANTED to be able to get results that others could not get.
As anyone who's read "The Double Helix" knows, competition in science was not new. It was, of course, hard to be sure, then and now, how much of this perception was accurate and how much was just my growing awareness of what had always been there.
Naturally, this was a frequent topic of spirited conversation.
I remember saying, "Well, IF my perceptions are correct, one of the things we should expect to see over the next decade or so is an increasing number of scandals involving faked data."
And I really think this is what we've seen.
(Of course I don't have numbers to back this up--faked data is not new, either).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I think you are breathing too much into the statement you're referring to. ...
I don't think so. I know that physics labs have less money now than before and that the public grants have gone to life sciences. And some people at (for instance) the CERN are quite pissed off by that. And I understand them. But then I work in the life sciences, so
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 fully agree with the author of the Physics Today article that the corporatisation of universities is quite dangerous.
So do I.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
(2) If people put their names on a paper, they should define their contributions and be responsible for the results. If they don't want to accept responsibility for parts of a paper because they didn't work on it, they should say so clearly.
Unfortunately, it has become common practice for people to pad their publications through multiple authorships: five people writing five papers each only have one publication each, but five people putting their names on each other's publications have five publications each; so much more marketable for job hunting that works by counting publications.
It doesn't look like much is changing. In response to the Schoen affair, the American Physical Society weasled out of a requirement of academic responsibility by all authors; things are just continuing the way they are. And scientific papers with little more substance than press releases are becoming increasing common, in particular in the biomedical sciences, as companies promise the sky and find them good PR and marketing materials. And editors are afraid to reject that junk.
But since the peer review system and system of academic publications is becoming increasingly corrupt and useless, perhaps on-line publishing of results without peer review will become the norm. Then, it is really word-of-mouth and recommendations by known friends, as opposed to anonymous reviewers, that matter.
Scientific misconduct is nothing new, but in the long run things work out. The scientific method is inherently self-correcting, but sometimes that takes decades to work out.
Some of the 19th century "competition" has become the stuff of legends. Edison vs. Telsa to design the national electric grid. Telsa's ideas won out. Edison vs. almost everyone else. The dinosaur pioneers Marshal and Cope. One used the others name for fossilized shit! But in the end the real facts survived and the garbage disappeared.
I disagree with the author's basic assumption: that the purpose of science is to find a higher truth, for its own sake, and that benefits to humanity are merely tangential spinoffs. I think science's purpose should be to create things that will improve the human condition, especially in fields of inquiry such as biology, where the results of scientific research can have almost immediate, tangible results on people.
I understand the arguments for more or less undirected research, that electricity or quantum physics or [insert science here] would never have been discovered without it. I disagree. Directed research would, I feel, have lead us to all of our modern breakthroughs anyway. It frustrates me, as a student, to see scientists waste time, money and effort on questions that are fundamentally not that important. It is much better to look for an effective HIV protease inhibitor than it is to look for patterns in the mating habits of fruit flies.
My other sig is also a
Speaking as a physicist (well, astronomer) the past decade or so has seen the rise of biology in the public's eyes, and the flow of money to the life sciences. If your science is purely defined by public popularity, though, you'd better hope that the public stays interested in biology.
We haven't had the equivalent of a public relations disaster for biology yet, which would cause public opinion to turn against it. All you need is a biological Chernobyl and you'll be tarred with the same brush that physicists have had applied to them. Not that I'd want anything like that, God forbid.
Also, is the authour of the article a bit bitter? Yes, but he does not speak for all physicists.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like a larger grant for some of my research, but we can't always get what we want, and if I *needed* the money, then I should bloody well write a better grant the next time around. Shame on me, not shame on the biologists. My personal moan aside, I think that money in science is well spent, whatever field it is in. If the research is exciting and interesting, by and large it does get funded.
I think there's the relatively modern issue of corporate interests and how they affect the flow of ideas in a given subject, and it just so happens that biology is the science that is facing this at the moment.
Hurm. Time for coffee!
Dr Fish
Those bombs were central to the government relationship with physics. As long as physicists were needed to design them, the government was happy to fund "basic research" to maintain a healthy field. From the perspective of the government, the main value coming from this research was in the physicists being trained, not the results they published. Now things have changed, and the government research enterprise is being reshaped along the lines of corporate research labs.
Also recognize that he is trying to persuade his intended audience of physicists to change their practices. It helps his case to remind them how the situation around them is changing.
It seems to me that RMS needs to come up with a GPL for scientific discoveries and inventions.
The human genome should have been GPL'd not BSD'd
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Engineering IS NOT independant of science
Yes, of course you are correct. You know it, I know it. But to the voters who must choose between $5 billion to build a supercollider or $5 billion in freeways and bridges, will they choose the scientist or the engineer?
I wrote my post poorly, so let me clarify. I was attempting to portray the dilemma of obtaining public funds for scientific research.
The perfect example is NASA. What do most people ask? "How is that going to help us?" Most people aren't satisfied by knowledge for its own sake, especially when their tax money is involved.
This is why, in my opinion, the public understands engineers better than scientists.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. -A. Turing