When Scientific Publishing was Withheld

karvind writes "Article in Physical Review Focus reveals the silence practiced by Physical Review during WWII to delay publishing results related to fission, the splitting of an atom's nucleus accompanied by a prodigious release of energy. From the article: Because of fears that Germany would use American research to pursue an atomic weapon, the Physical Review agreed to withhold reports of significant advances. It was not until several months after an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan, that Phys. Rev. published the paper announcing the discovery of plutonium, the material used in that bomb. Physicist Abraham Pais later called the journal's silence on the subject 'the most important nonevent in the history of the Physical Review.'"

Comments

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

[Scarblac]

For people who like this subject matter and want to read more about the history of the development of atomic bombs (including the history of early 20th century atomic physics), I can recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Solid history _and_ good writing.

I bought it after it was recommended in some other Slashdot post, and loved it.

Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th

[Knights who say 'INT]

According to a theorem usually attributed to Cybenko, any continuous nonlinear function can be represented by a linear combination of sigmoid functions of a linear combination of your parameters. In neural nets terms, a single hidden layer net with 2n+1 neurons in your hidden layer can represent _any_ continuous function.

That doesn't mean the usual neural net training algorithms are able to achieve that representation, but it's still a strong result, and it mostly justifies neural nets being increasingly looked at seriously at nonparametric (without individual input effect parameters as an usual OLS model would yield) statistics.

All in all, I do have a lot of faith in the future of nonparametric methods. They might be no substitute of empirical experiment (and that's what the parametric statistical methods that comprise econometrics strive for), but the sheer success of neural nets in spite of their lukewarm academic reception shows they can be quite useful.

Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th

[rgmoore]

Economics is not a science because there are no experiments to prove its hypotheses, unlike medicen which does it as much as possible.

There are two problems with this argument:

1. It is possible to perform economic experiments. I've participated (as a subject) in microeconomic experiments. The experimenters would present us with a designed trading setup and test to see how we behaved; they ensured that we behaved rationally by giving cash payouts tied to our economic success in the experimental system. Those kinds of experiments put much of microeconomics on a sound scientific footing.
2. If lack of experiments prevents something from being a science, then you can scratch fields like Astronomy and Paleontology off the list of sciences. Those fields are sciences, though, because it doesn't really matter whether you're studying results of planned experiments or pre-existing events. If it's possible to isolate factors and compare their significance, it's possible to test hypotheses, and that's the true test of science. That is possible in economics- it's possible to study the impact of taxes by comparing different American states with different tax codes, for instance- so economics counts as a science.

Re:slightly OT: nitpick

[Hartree]

Not really.

Plutonium was being produced in the Oklo natural nuclear reactor that was running in Gabon 2 billion years ago. It had decayed away by the time we showed up on the scene. See this, for example.

We learned of it by making it, but nature had done it long before us.