Slashdot Mirror
Oil Isn't from Dinosaurs & Other Iconoclasms
jkeene writes "The Washington Post has an article on Thomas Gold, a scientist who thinks oil doesn't come from dinosaurs, amongst other interesting theories. Some of Gold's other strange ideas turned out to be true, like pulsars. It's in the Style section, not exactly a peer-reviewed journal, but it has names and references. " I always like reading about iconoclasts, because at least I know there are people out there questioning even our basic assumptions.
I wholeheartedly agree with Gold on the issue that peer review is a stifling factor in modern scientific research, one that I have often thought to put economic viability before scientific worth.
After all, what better way to get an edge on your competitor than to pre-qualify their products before they are released for general acceptance in the scientific 'marketplace'.
Imagine this same system being used by such scientific innovators as Microsoft and Sun, and you see why this is really not the best way for scientific validity to be obtained.
The fact is, such things as 'competitive interest' and 'peer acceptance' have no place in scientific research - they are simply forms of maintaining status quo amongst the players involved (i.e. what everyone thinks and accepts, as opposed to what 'individuals discover'), rather than means by which scientific progress can flourish and prosper.
I think we find a lot of this anti-establishment view in the Slashdot/open source community as well - certainly its evident in the OS arena. If we all agreed to only use that which had been peer approved, we'd be subject to the rules of marketing and economics, and thus we wouldn't be using such alternative OS's as BeOS/FreeBSD/Linux, etc. By this stance, Microsoft NT would be the only valid operating system - and in fact, in some realms of the computer industry, this is the case.
Now, I don't think 'peer review' of code is the same thing here, though... in an open source environment, we're more prone to a 'peer cooperative' effort than 'peer review' - i.e. if you find bugs in someone elses software, fix it and let 'em have the fix - thus progress is made.
I for one look forward to reading his memoirs when they are published - and I monitor with continued interest the Slashdot view on 'scientific methods'.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Ok. A little clarification is in order.
The Big Bang, which is still a much debated THEORY, happened..a long time ago. At the "time" of the Big Bang (since we have no idea what the concept of time would have meant back then) the universe ITSELF exploded. There wasn't a tiny piece of matter that contained everything..the universe itself exploded and sent into motion _everything_. This explains microwave background radiation - we detect it everywhere, from every direction, equally. This radiation was released in the Big Bang, so it literally fills the universe.
To go on...matter essentially didn't exist at this time. Some fundamental particles were in existence, but nothing that exists now in our percieved nature. Most of what "inhabited" the universe was radiation. Until approximately 10^-43 seconds, no one has any idea. Between 10^-43 s and 10^-35 s, what existed is called the GUT era - Grand Unified Theory era. At this point, everything was uniform - quarks and leptons were the same thing, in other words. From 10^-35 to 10^-4 s is called the Hadron era. This refers to the "soup" that was the universe...extremely dense radiation and quarks and such. Physics, matter, and energy were beginning to form [remember, they didn't exist before..physics came about during the Big Bang].
From 10^-4 to 10 seconds was the Lepton era. Lighter particles - electrons, neutrinos, etc - were dominant, along with lots of heat and radiation. The next 5*10^7 years were dominated by radiation, then from then to now became matter dominated as radiation formed matter and solar systems and such began to form.
Throughout this time, the average temperature of the universe has steadily declined, from around 10^32 K to its present state of about 3 K.
If you're still awake, it's obvious that no hydrocarbons were formed at the Big Bang. Chances are that Gold knows this very well, but the reporter screwed it up pretty royally.
There's your lesson on cosmology for the day..
Cheers
But: on average, it works.
True, it is biased towards incremental progress rather than revolutions, but that is the way science works most of the time. Most of us do not recreate whole systems of thought like Feynman (another iconoclast idol) - the times that require that are few and far between. (Though for physics, the current impasse with GUTs might be one of them.)
The reason we have to submit to the tyranny of peer review is simple: no one is an expert on everything. With our increasingly narrow specialisations, I know next to nothing about topic A at wavelength B, though I'm the world's expert on topic C. So if someone says A affects C in some way, I have much less chance of judging his claim correctly than another expert in A. But I should hear about, not have that view supressed by others, right?
So now we have preprint servers. One little 386 (yes!) at LANL archives all the submitted preprints in astronomy and physics on a daily basis - some people submit them after peer review and acceptance at a major journal (to prevent embarrassing retractions), some people submit them as soon as they send in a paper (to establish priority) and some people just publish papers on the preprint servers (and we know them well, as kooks of various kinds).
In this day, when results are shared at conferences and off webservers, journals are having an increasingly hard time justifying subscriptions. (I read preprint abstracts daily, and never use dead tree journals...) So they are evolving into keepers of standards - if its published in the Fancy Journal of UnGnomon News, it must be good stuff on Gnus!
That's quite enough raving - but as for this comment in the article: 'He [..] migrated to a "much more livable" environment at Cornell' - let me just add: "yeah, right!"
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
There was one line in particular which I totally agree with in this article - about how Gold "always shakes things up in a useful way"
No matter how correct people may think his theories are, the effect these theories have upon researchers etc. in the particular field is what is important. If Gold manages to inspire someone to prove him WRONG, by working at the problem from a different angle, then everyone wins.
Too often in academic circles, certain views can be taken as correct, without being proven. This is counter-productive; it is important that researchers disagree and argue - this is how important theories can arise, and how discoveries
can be made.
Whether it's stable-state Universe versus big-bang, or the exact value of Hubbles's constant, or whatever, these arguments can drive great discoveries.