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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.
"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.