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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.'"
Firstuvall, I'd like to applaud the uncommon scientific focus of this; topics related to science in general are gee-whiz news of space exploration, not about science in its making. I would guess many slashdotters are scientists, and this brings good rest from the "SCO says they own Mickey Mouse and the patents to condoms" days.
That said, peer-reviewed outfits are still ran by humans. Neural nets have been essentially blocked by the nonparametric statistics community for a long while -- leading to the bizarre situation of having electrical engineers understand a lot about time-series prediction that the people who are actually involved with it don't -- and is only now making advance as econometricians -- who typically develop parametric statistical methods and then try to fit everything to their methods -- are adopting it, partly because of sheer job-market pressure.
And all that is in a pretty technical, numbers-in-numbers-out field.
So you pick up a peer-reviewed rag in economics -- and if economics isn't science, medicine isn't either --, and it risks having at least three types of ideological bias: a political one (generally from the more-or-less-state-intervention kind), a established-scientific-practices one (people already know their field, and getting game-theorists to accept category theory and arrow-chasing proofs is proving hard) _and_ a schools-competition one (possibly linked to political issues, since hyping up schools linked to free-market stances will harm the more-intervention camp).
Yes, you could say that physics has less politics involved. But when you're dealing with the very nature of "actual stuff", you are bumping into very deep philosophical stances that may be much harder to shake than political convictions with the scientific process only. I know many people who have come to adopt a more-free-market POV after being exposed to general equilibrium and microeconomic theory, but it's harder to convince people -- Einstein wouldn't -- that the universe is ultimately stochastic, or that our behaviour might be evolutionarily stable and a product of our genes, etc. etc.
In the end, economics has nothing like the controversy on sociobiology. Outside radical circles who have been essentially ignoring economic theory since uncertainty and assymetric information have come into play in the models, there is a very deep consensus among economists at least in the basic issues -- from Paul Krugman to Arthur Laffer.
Politics is just politics. We have our own interests, and we act to defend them. And after a while, people start to analyze what people do in the defense of their interests, and the action of special-interest groups, rent-seeking behaviour, etc. becomes clear.
Personal philosophies are a lot muddier. And physics touches the bottom of them.
Economics does not use the scientific method of observations-hypotheseis-experiment-revisions. Medicine is willing to use a clinical trial where some part of the observed population gets new treatments and others don't. Economists seldom do this, with an all or nothing approach to changes in economic structures that prevent proper scientific analysis.
"A Soviet scientist deduced from the Americans' silence on the topic that they were pursuing an atomic bomb. The Soviets soon followed suit."
It's an information theory problem. Before the war, there was a steady stream of related work that was being published. During the war, that dried up. The lack of information is information in itself.
Unfortunately, there really wasn't a suitable way around this. They couldn't publish material that would help the enemy. They couldn't publish misinformation in its place, as all the physicists reading would call shenanigans. A pre-emptive approach of not allowing publishing of this nature at all that might have been implemented before the war would stifle the scientific process. There's no real way to combat this kind of information leak.
Lets leave this aside, but economics is in my opinion no real science, because it uses the wrong methods and aims for the wrong goals. Economics comes all down to psychology (I would call economics the psychology of greed) but yet they try to enforce the rules after the whole system is tried to be described after mathematics. Modern mathematics failed basically in one area to be applied usefully and that is psychology. All the models which are applied to economics usually only work out in the best case because the description only cann fill one angle instead of proximity patterns. And in the end there usually comes the case where the system of formulas applied to being greedy crumbles to dust. Modern economics is the closest thing to alchemy we have nowadays.
"They were firm in their belief that if Hitler got the bomb, he would use it without hesitation."
But they seemed to overlook the fact that their country would use it without hesitation.
Eventual winners blowing up the world = heroes.
Eventual losers blowing up the world = terrorists.