Posts Tagged ‘history of science’
“The pursuit of science is a grand adventure, driven by curiosity, fueled by passion, and guided by reason”*…
Adam Mastroianni on how science advances (and how it’s held back), with a provocative set of suggestions for how it might be accelerated…
There are two kinds of problems in the world: strong-link problems and weak-link problems.
Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely.
Food safety, for example, is a weak-link problem. You don’t want to eat anything that will kill you. That’s why it makes sense for the Food and Drug Administration to inspect processing plants, to set standards, and to ban dangerous foods…
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Weak-link problems are everywhere. A car engine is a weak-link problem: it doesn’t matter how great your spark plugs are if your transmission is busted. Nuclear proliferation is a weak-link problem: it would be great if, say, France locked up their nukes even tighter, but the real danger is some rogue nation blowing up the world. Putting on too-tight pants is a weak-link problem: they’re gonna split at the seams.
It’s easy to assume that all problems are like this, but they’re not. Some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters. Like music, for instance. You listen to the stuff you like the most and ignore the rest. When your favorite band releases a new album, you go “yippee!” When a band you’ve never heard of and wouldn’t like anyway releases a new album, you go…nothing at all, you don’t even know it’s happened. At worst, bad music makes it a little harder for you to find good music, or it annoys you by being played on the radio in the grocery store while you’re trying to buy your beetle-free asparagus…
Strong-link problems are everywhere; they’re just harder to spot. Winning the Olympics is a strong-link problem: all that matters is how good your country’s best athletes are. Friendships are a strong-link problem: you wouldn’t trade your ride-or-dies for better acquaintances. Venture capital is a strong-link problem: it’s fine to invest in a bunch of startups that go bust as long as one of them goes to a billion…
In the long run, the best stuff is basically all that matters, and the bad stuff doesn’t matter at all. The history of science is littered with the skulls of dead theories. No more phlogiston nor phlegm, no more luminiferous ether, no more geocentrism, no more measuring someone’s character by the bumps on their head, no more barnacles magically turning into geese, no more invisible rays shooting out of people’s eyes, no more plum pudding…
Our current scientific beliefs are not a random mix of the dumbest and smartest ideas from all of human history, and that’s because the smarter ideas stuck around while the dumber ones kind of went nowhere, on average—the hallmark of a strong-link problem. That doesn’t mean better ideas win immediately. Worse ideas can soak up resources and waste our time, and frauds can mislead us temporarily. It can take longer than a human lifetime to figure out which ideas are better, and sometimes progress only happens when old scientists die. But when a theory does a better job of explaining the world, it tends to stick around.
(Science being a strong-link problem doesn’t mean that science is currently strong. I think we’re still living in the Dark Ages, just less dark than before.)
Here’s the crazy thing: most people treat science like it’s a weak-link problem.
Peer reviewing publications and grant proposals, for example, is a massive weak-link intervention. We spend ~15,000 collective years of effort every year trying to prevent bad research from being published. We force scientists to spend huge chunks of time filling out grant applications—most of which will be unsuccessful—because we want to make sure we aren’t wasting our money…
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I think there are two reasons why scientists act like science is a weak-link problem.
The first reason is fear. Competition for academic jobs, grants, and space in prestigious journals is more cutthroat than ever. When a single member of a grant panel, hiring committee, or editorial board can tank your career, you better stick to low-risk ideas. That’s fine when we’re trying to keep beetles out of asparagus, but it’s not fine when we’re trying to discover fundamental truths about the world…
The second reason is status. I’ve talked to a lot of folks since I published The rise and fall of peer review and got a lot of comments, and I’ve realized that when scientists tell me, “We need to prevent bad research from being published!” they often mean, “We need to prevent people from gaining academic status that they don’t deserve!” That is, to them, the problem with bad research isn’t really that it distorts the scientific record. The problem with bad research is that it’s cheating.
I get that. It’s maddening to watch someone get ahead using shady tactics, and it might seem like the solution is to tighten the rules so we catch more of the cheaters. But that’s weak-link thinking. The real solution is to care less about the hierarchy…
Here’s our reward for a generation of weak-link thinking.
The US government spends ~10x more on science today than it did in 1956, adjusted for inflation. We’ve got loads more scientists, and they publish way more papers. And yet science is less disruptive than ever, scientific productivity has been falling for decades, and scientists rate the discoveries of decades ago as worthier than the discoveries of today. (Reminder, if you want to blame this on ideas getting harder to find, I will fight you.)…
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Whether we realize it or not, we’re always making calls like this. Whenever we demand certificates, credentials, inspections, professionalism, standards, and regulations, we are saying: “this is a weak-link problem; we must prevent the bad!”
Whenever we demand laissez-faire, the cutting of red tape, the letting of a thousand flowers bloom, we are saying: “this is a strong-link problem; we must promote the good!”
When we get this right, we fill the world with good things and rid the world of bad things. When we don’t, we end up stunting science for a generation. Or we end up eating a lot of asparagus beetles…
“Science is a strong-link problem,” from @a_m_mastroianni in @science_seeds.
* James Clerk Maxwell
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As we ponder the process of progress, we might spare a thought for Sir Christopher Wren; he died on this date in 1723. A mathematician and astronomer (who co-founded and later served as president of the Royal Society), he is better remembered as one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history; he was given responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill.
Wren, whose scientific work ranged broadly– e.g., he invented a “weather clock” similar to a modern barometer, new engraving methods, and helped develop a blood transfusion technique– was admired by Isaac Newton, as Newton noted in the Principia.
“The spirit of inquiry and the courage to challenge the status quo are at the heart of scientific progress”*…
Adam Mastroianni on the challenges– and opportunities– facing science…
Randomized-controlled trials only caught on about 80 years ago, and whenever I think about that, I have to sit down and catch my breath for a while. The thing everybody agrees is the “gold standard” of evidence, the thing the FDA requires before it will legally allow you to sell a drug—that thing is younger than my grandparents.
There are a few records of things that kind of look like randomized-controlled trials throughout history, but people didn’t really appreciate the importance of RCTs until 1948, when the British Medical Research Council published a trial on streptomycin for tuberculosis. Humans have possessed the methods of randomization for thousands of years—dice, coins, the casting of lots—and we’ve been trying to cure diseases for as long as we’ve been human. Why did it take us so long to put them together?
I think the answer is: first, we had to stop trusting Zeus.
To us, coin flips are random (“Heads: I go first. Tails: you go first.”). But to an ancient human, coin flips aren’t random at all—they reveal the will of the gods (“Heads: Zeus wants me to go first. Tails: Zeus wants you to go first”). In the Bible, for instance, people are always casting lots to figure out what God wants them to do: which goat to kill, who should get each tract of land, when to start a genocide, etc.
This is, of course, a big problem for running RCTs. If you think that the outcome of a coin flip is meaningful rather than meaningless, you can’t use it to produce two equivalent groups, and you can’t study the impact of doing something to one group and not the other. You can only run a ZCT—a Zeus controlled trial.
It’s easy to see how technology can lead to scientific discoveries. Make microscope -> discover mitochondria.
Clearly, though, sometimes those technologies get invented entirely inside our heads. Stop trusting Zeus -> develop RCTs.
Which raises the question: what mental technologies haven’t we invented yet? What brain switches are just waiting to be flipped?…
On reinvigorating science: “Declining trust in Zeus is a technology,” from @a_m_mastroianni.
Apposite to an issue he raises: “Citation cartels help some mathematicians—and their universities—climb the rankings,” from @ScienceMagazine.
[Image above: source]
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As we deliberate on discovery, we might send micro-biological birthday greetings to a woman who modeled the attitude and behavior that Mastroianni suggests: Ruth Sager; she was born on this date in 1918. A pioneering geneticist, she had, in effect, two careers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, she pioneered the field of cytoplasmic genetics by discovering transmission of genetic traits through chloroplast DNA, the first known example of genetics not involving the cell nucleus. She identified a second set of genes were found outside of the cell’s nucleus, which, even though they were nonchrosomomal, also influenced inherited characteristics. The academic community did not acknowledge the significance of her contribution until after the second wave of feminism in the 1970s.
Then, in the early 1970s, she moved into cancer genetics (with a specific focus on breast cancer); she proposed and investigated the roles of tumor suppressor genes. She identified over 100 potential tumor suppressor genes, developed cell culture methods to study normal and cancerous human and other mammalian cells in the laboratory, and pioneered the research into “expression genetics,” the study of altered gene expression.
“Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that’s put to use more gold begets.”*…
The scientific literature is vast. No individual human can fully know all the published research findings, even within a single field of science. As Ulkar Aghayeva explains, regardless of how much time a scientist spends reading the literature, there’ll always be what the information scientist Don Swanson called ‘undiscovered public knowledge’: knowledge that exists and is published somewhere, but still remains largely unknown.
Some scientific papers receive very little attention after their publication – some, indeed, receive no attention whatsoever. Others, though, can languish with few citations for years or decades, but are eventually rediscovered and become highly cited. These are the so-called ‘sleeping beauties’ of science.
The reasons for their hibernation vary. Sometimes it is because contemporaneous scientists lack the tools or practical technology to test the idea. Other times, the scientific community does not understand or appreciate what has been discovered, perhaps because of a lack of theory. Yet other times it’s a more sublunary reason: the paper is simply published somewhere obscure and it never makes its way to the right readers.
What can sleeping beauties tell us about how science works? How do we rediscover information the scientific body of knowledge already contains but that is not widely known? Is it possible that, if we could understand sleeping beauties in a more systematic way, we might be able to accelerate scientific progress?
Sleeping beauties are more common than you might expect.
The term sleeping beauties was coined by Anthony van Raan, a researcher in quantitative studies of science, in 2004. In his study, he identified sleeping beauties between 1980 and 2000 based on three criteria: first, the length of their ‘sleep’ during which they received few if any citations. Second, the depth of that sleep – the average number of citations during the sleeping period. And third, the intensity of their awakening – the number of citations that came in the four years after the sleeping period ended. Equipped with (somewhat arbitrarily chosen) thresholds for these criteria, van Raan identified sleeping beauties at a rate of about 0.01 percent of all published papers in a given year.
Later studies hinted that sleeping beauties are even more common than that. A systematic study in 2015, using data from 384,649 papers published in American Physical Society journals, along with 22,379,244 papers from the search engine Web of Science, found a wide, continuous range of delayed recognition of papers in all scientific fields. This increases the estimate of the percentage of sleeping beauties at least 100-fold compared to van Raan’s.
Many of those papers became highly influential many decades after their publication – far longer than the typical time windows for measuring citation impact. For example, Herbert Freundlich’s paper ‘Concerning Adsorption in Solutions’ (though its original title is in German) was published in 1907, but began being regularly cited in the early 2000s due to its relevance to new water purification technologies. William Hummers and Richard Offeman’s ‘Preparation of Graphitic Oxide’, published in 1958, also didn’t ‘awaken’ until the 2000s: in this case because it was very relevant to the creation of the soon-to-be Nobel Prize–winning material graphene…
Indeed, one of the most famous physics papers, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (EPR)’s ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ (1935) is a classic example of a sleeping beauty…
More examples, and explanation of why they slumber, and thoughts on how to awaken them sooner: “Waking up science’s sleeping beauties,” from @ulkar_aghayeva in @WorksInProgMag.
[Image above: source]
* Shakespeare, “Venus and Adonis”
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As we dwell on discovery, we might send healing birthday greetings to a woman whose scientific work thankfully rarely napped, Gertrude Elion; she was born on this date in 1918. A pharmacologist, she shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design (focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error) in the development of new drugs. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well-known and widely deployed creations also include the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection, and a number of drugs used in cancer treatment.
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: Patricia Fara explains how the tension between religion and science as arbiters of knowledge came to head in the French Revolution, and how that inspired Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, to introduce a radically new way of thinking about human beings:
… God had been forcefully excluded from astronomy during the French Revolution, when Pierre-Simon Laplace rewrote Newton’s ideas to create his deterministic cosmos, in which scientific laws govern every movement of every planet with no need for divine intervention. Inspired by this success, a Belgian astronomer called Alphonse Queteler decided that human societies are also controlled by laws. Each country has its own statistical patterns that remain constant from year to year–suicide and crime rates, for instance–and so Quetelet suggested that an ‘average man’ can consistently encapsulate a nation’s characteristics. Politicians should, Quetelet prescribed, operate like social physicists and try to improve average behaviour rather than worry about extreme anomalies. For him, variations from the statistical mean were–like planetary wobbles–imperfections to be smoothed out so that overall progress could be ensured.
Quetelet had introduced a radically new way of thinking about human beings. As one of his admirers put it, ‘Man is seen to be an enigma only as an individual, in mass, he is a mathematical problem.’ Quetelet’s successors took his ideas in many different directions. For one thing, his work was valuable politically because it could be interpreted in different ways. While conservatives insisted that little could be done to alter the current system, radicals accused governments of impeding the natural course of progress, and Utopians–such as Karl Marx–envisaged harmonious societies governed by nature’s own laws guaranteeing improvement. Data collection projects proliferated, and statisticians searched for laws governing every aspect of life, ranging from the weather to the growth of civilization, from stock market fluctuations to the incidence of disease. Many scientists took their ideas from Quetelet rather than from abstract textbooks–but they added their own twist. Whereas Quetelet regarded individual deviations from the norm as errors to be eliminated, scientists set out to study how variations occur…
An excerpt from Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History, via the invaluable Delanceyplace.com (@delanceyplace): “God, Science, and Data.”
* Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
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As we focus on frames, we might spare a thought for a man who kept his eye on the individual, Wilhelm Reich. A medical doctor and psychoanalyst, he was a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. Reich developed a system of psychoanalysis concentrating on overall character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. His early work on psychoanalytic technique was overshadowed by his involvement in the sexual-politics movement and by “orgonomy,” a pseudoscientific system he developed. He also built a device he called a cloud buster, with which he claimed he could manipulate the weather by manipulating the “orgone” in the atmosphere. Reich’s claims aroused much controversy; and he was taken to court for fraud by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The court ordered his books and research burned and his equipment destroyed. Reich was sentenced to prison where he died of heart failure on this date in 1957.
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”*…
… and, Rachael Scarborough King and Seth Rudy argue, to serve a clear purpose…
Right now, many forms of knowledge production seem to be facing their end. The crisis of the humanities has reached a tipping point of financial and popular disinvestment, while technological advances such as new artificial intelligence programmes may outstrip human ingenuity. As news outlets disappear, extreme political movements question the concept of objectivity and the scientific process. Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.
We want to offer a new perspective by arguing that it is salutary – or even desirable – for knowledge projects to confront their ends. With humanities scholars, social scientists and natural scientists all forced to defend their work, from accusations of the ‘hoax’ of climate change to assumptions of the ‘uselessness’ of a humanities degree, knowledge producers within and without academia are challenged to articulate why they do what they do and, we suggest, when they might be done. The prospect of an artificially or externally imposed end can help clarify both the purpose and endpoint of our scholarship.
We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work – in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation.
Our volume The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences (2023) asks how we should understand the ends of knowledge today. What is the relationship between an individual knowledge project – say, an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, or the creation of a Large Language Model – and the aim of a discipline or field? In areas ranging from physics to literary studies to activism to climate science, we asked practitioners to consider the ends of their work – its purpose – as well as its end: the point at which it might be complete. The responses showed surprising points of commonality in identifying the ends of knowledge, as well as the value of having the end in sight…
Read on for a provocative case that academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and a consideration of whether some of those should come to an end: “The Ends of Knowledge,” in @aeonmag.
* Albert Einstein
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As we contemplate conclusions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1869 that the first issue of the journal Nature was published. Taking it’s title from a line of Wordsworth’s (“To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye”), its aim was to “provide cultivated readers with an accessible forum for reading about advances in scientific knowledge.” It remains a weekly, international, interdisciplinary journal of science, one of the few remaining that publish across a wide array of fields. It is consistently ranked the world’s most cited scientific journal and is ascribed an impact factor of approximately 64.8, making it one of the world’s top academic journals.
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