第四夜

Posted 2020-08-16

In the idealized version of how science is done, facts about the world are waiting to be observed and collected by objective researchers who use the scientific method to carry out their work. But in the everyday practice of science, discovery frequently follows an ambiguous and complicated route. We aim to be objective, but we cannot escape the context of our unique life experiences. Prior knowledge and interests influence what we experience, what we think our experience mean, and the subsequent actions we take. Opportunities for misinterpretaion, error, and self-deception abound.

Consequently, discovery claims should be thought of as protoscience. Similar to newly staked mining claims, they are full of potential. But it takes collective scrutiny and acceptance to transform a discovery claim into a mature discovery. This is the credibility process, through which the individual researcher‘s me, here, now becomes the community‘s anyone, anywhere, anytime. Objective knowledge is the goal, not the starting point.

Once a discovery claim becomes public, the discoverer receives intellectual credit. But, unlike with mining claims, the community takes control of what happens next. Within the complex social structure of the scientific community, researchers make discoveries; editors and reviewers act as gatekeepers by controlling the publication process; other scientists use the new finding to suit their own purposes; and finally, the public (including other scientists) receives the new discoveries and possibly accompanying technology. As a discovery claim works its way through the community, the interaction and confrontation between shared and competing beliefs about the science and the technology involved transforms an individual‘s discovery claim into the community‘s credible discovery.

Two paradoxes exist throughout this credibility process. First, scientific work tends to focus on some aspect of prevailing knowledge that is viewed as incomplete or incorrect. Little reward accompanies duplication and confirmation of what is already known and believed. The goal is new-search, not re-search. Not surprisingly, newly published discovery claims and credible discoveries that appear to be important and convincing will always be open to challenge and potential modification or reputation by future researchers. Second, novelty itself frequently provokes disbelief. Nobel Laureate and physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi once described discovery as "seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." But thinking what nobody else has thought and telling others waht they have missed may not change their views. Sometimes years are required for truly novel discovery claim to be accepted and appreciated.

In the end, credibility "happens" to a discovery claim -- a process that corresponds to what philospoher Annette Baier has described as the commons of the mind. "We reason together, challenge, revise and complete each other‘s reasoning and each other‘s conceptions of reason."

 

 

The US ＄ 3-million Fundamental Physics Prize is indeed an interesting experiment, as Alexander Polyakov said when he accepted this year‘s award in March. And it is far from the only one of its type. As a News Feature article in Nature discusses, a string of lucrative awards for reasearchers have joined the Nobel Prizes in recent years. Many, like the Fundamental Physics Prize, are funded from the telephone-number-sized bank accounts of Internet entrepreneurs. These benefactors have succeeded in their chosen fields, they say, and they want to use their wealth to draw attention to those who have succeeded in science.

What‘s not to like? Quite a lot, according to a handful of scientists quoted in the News Feature. You cannot buy class, as the old saying goes, and these upstart entrepreneurs cannot buy their prizes the prestige of the Nobels. The new awards are an exercise in self-promotion for those behind them, says scientists. They could distort the achievement-based system of peer-review-led research. They could cement the status quo of peer-reviewed research. They do not fund peer-reviewed research. They perpertuate the myth of the lone genius.

The goals of the prize-givers seem as scattered as the criticism. Some want to shock, others to draw people into science, or to better reward those who have made their careers in research.

As Nature has pointed out before, there are some legitimate concerns about how science prizes -- both new and old -- are distributed. The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, launched this years, takes an unrepresentative view of what the life sciences include. But the Nobel Foundation‘s limit of three recipients per prize, each of whom must still be living, has long been outgrown by the collaborative nature of modern research -- as will be demonstrated by the inevitable row over who is ignored when it comes to acknowledging the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Nobels were, of course, themselves set up by a very rich individual who had decided what he wanted to do with his own money. Time, rather than intention, has given them legitimacy.

As much as some scientists may complain about the new awards, two things seem clear. First, most reasearchers would accept such a prize if they were offered one. Second, it is surely a good thing that the money and attention come to science rather than go elsewhere. It is fair to criticize and question the mechanism -- that is the culture of research, after all -- but it is the prize-givers‘ money question the mechanism -- that is the culture of research, after all -- but it is the prize-givers‘ money to do with as they please. It is wise to take such gifts with gratitiude and grace.