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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.'"
"A Soviet scientist deduced from the Americans' silence on the topic that they were pursuing an atomic bomb. The Soviets soon followed suit."
Amateur paranoiacs cannot hope to compete with professional ones.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
That is a very excellent book. In fact, I believe the main point of this article is dealt with in that book. The import of this was that until that point, scientists had been much more isolated from these types of political interventions. As a previous poster here has pointed out, this intervention is more common now.
I think something else to consider with this was that a lot of the people pushing to keep the Germans in the dark had a good idea of what they were dealing with. Many of these scientists were former residents of Germany, Italy, and some of the other countries of Europe. They felt it to their core that Hitler would stop at nothing and would use all the means at his disposal to win. They were firm in their belief that if Hitler got the bomb, he would use it without hesitation. It seemed to them that there were two ways to defeat this.
First, keeping Hitler in the dark as much as possible. Reports after the fact on Hitler Germany's progess with a bomb show that they were pretty well in the dark. Secondly, they thought they should work towards building a bomb as quickly as possible to defeat Hitler. They were pretty succuessful on that point too.
Another good book by Rhodes that continues from where "Making the Atomic Bomb leaves off is Dark Sun: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/068Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
I agree that science is more policitized than many people think. But let me just add my two cents worth regarding pseudo-"black box" methods.
One of the reasons Neural Networks were viewed with some doubt was because of their "pseudo-black box" nature. Train it enough and you will get a model that gives you a good fit for your data, but you have no insight as to interpret the results, not least because you will almost never get the same model twice from the same data (the weights will be different every time you train them).
The neural networks idea sounded interesting because of the "cool" biological analogue it has with neurons firing in your brain (and it had interesting jargon to boot).
But if you look at its mathematical description it boils down to doing a simple regression/curve fitting with a limited nonlinear model that uses exponential functions (known in the NN community as "activation functions") like the sigmoid etc. (You can actually derive this if you write out the equations for a simple 1-2 layer neural network).
It spits out data that fits the curve, but tells you nothing about the correlations inside them. In the 1980s, people were attracted to it because of its simplicity and the fact that it seemed to be feasible way of mimicking a human's pattern matching abilities. It was all the rage back then. In the 1990s or so, people started to become aware of its weaknesses and began to look at it more circumspectly.
To give you an example, most credit card companies use Neural Networks to approve credit card applications. They pump your application data through a trained model (based on past classifications done by humans), and it spits out an "Approved" or "Not Approved" flag.
Unfortunately, you have no idea why a certain application is approved or not approved. A neural network model can't tell you that. It's only designed to give you an answer based on the its training weights, i.e. it only models the relationship between Y and X, and not the Y and X spaces themselves.
Instead, if you apply a multivariate statistical method such as PLS (via a NIPALS algorithm), the model will tell you how things are correlated (in a easy to interpret graphical fashion). It will pretty much be doing the same thing as the neural network, except that it models the X and Y spaces simultaneously, compensates for missing data by deriving from the correlation structures; all this by transforming the variables into a latent variable space that captures the maximum covariance in the data. All the equations are transparent and have a solid basis in the mathematics of linear transformations and projections.
And you get the same model each time, so it can tell you exactly why your credit card application was turned down. (Too many unpaid bills, for instance)
It is easy to become enamored of black-box methods (I know I was), but ultimately the methods that survive are the ones built on rigorous mathematical/scientific foundations. (not always possible, especially in areas like economics, but it is something to strive for)
Most ideas and theories get superseded over time, but black-box methods and theories produce the most controversies. Sometimes you can't blame the community for being a little skeptical of them.
Yes, much of the silence in scientific circles is political or, as in the case of wartime, to protect national interests.
Private interests get in the game too though. Drug studies are squelched if the sponsors don't like the results, and people wind up dying. Decades-old industry studies of smoking tobacco never saw the light of day until recently. You always hear rumors about car and energy companies not telling all they know about more efficient motors and fuels, but "those are just rumors."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actually Germany itself was not so in the dark, the core scientists who basically could have figured it out, refused to work on it on a serious scale.
The english basically captured the core scientists which worked on the bomb, and put them into a camp under surveillance. After they got the news that the US had the bomb (the war was over by then) they seriously sat together and figured out how things were working correctly withing a few days (they did not have anything to prevent anymore and basically could focus on science again)
Don't forget germany had in the 20s and 30s some of the best physics scientists in existence and not all of them were jews and had to emigrate. So basically the knowledge was there, but call it the hand of god, that the scientists who could figure it out how to build it refused to do it innerly.