Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [40]
The Shared Praxes of Science
Science is well suited for collective intelligence. Most fields of science have a large repository of powerful techniques shared by the scientists working in that field. There are widely agreed standards for what it means for an argument or analysis or experimental procedure to be correct. This was illustrated vividly by the Polymath Project, where discussion was carried out in a remarkably civil tone. On those rare occasions where disagreement occurred, it was usually because someone had made an outright error in reasoning. Someone else would point out the error, without rancor, whereupon the originator would immediately acknowledge their mistake. This is not to say that participants never engaged in speculation, but they carefully marked their speculation as such, and didn’t present it as incontrovertible fact. On nearly all crucial issues the participants rapidly agreed on when a line of argument was right and when it was wrong, and on when an idea was promising and when it was not. It was that rapid agreement which made it possible to scale up collaboration.
As an illustration of how strongly held these standards are in science, consider the work of the young Albert Einstein, not the scientific icon we know of today, but as an unknown 26-year-old clerk working in the Swiss patent office, unable to find a job as a professional physicist. From that position of obscurity, in 1905 Einstein published his famous papers on special relativity, radically changing our notions of space, time, energy, and mass. Other scientists had partially anticipated Einstein’s conclusions, but none so boldly and forcefully laid out the full consequence Scspecial relativity. Einstein’s proposals were astounding, yet his arguments were so compelling that his work was published in one of the leading physics journals of his day, and was rapidly accepted by most leading physicists. How remarkable that an outsider, a virtual unknown, could come in to challenge many of our most fundamental beliefs about how the universe works. And, in no time at all, the community of physicists essentially said, “Yeah, you’re right.”
As another example, consider the discovery of the structure of DNA. This discovery was made by James Watson and Francis Crick, using data due in part to Rosalind Franklin. All three were young, unheralded scientists: Watson was 24, and Crick was 36, reestablishing himself after a brief career in physics and work in the British Admiralty during World War II. Franklin was 32. Racing them to the discovery was the world’s leading chemist, Linus Pauling. More than a decade earlier, the brilliant Pauling had made a series of discoveries that would eventually win him a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. If he could solve the structure of DNA, another prize would surely follow. At one point during the race he gave Watson and Crick a tremendous scare, announcing that he’d found the structure. But Watson and Crick spoke with Pauling’s son, Peter Pauling, who showed them Pauling senior’s proposed structure for DNA. To their astonishment, they quickly realized that Pauling was wrong: the world’s greatest chemist had made a simple mistake in basic chemistry, a mistake his own textbooks should have alerted him to. Watson and Crick went back to their work with renewed intensity, and soon after found the right structure. When that happened it didn’t matter that Pauling was world famous while Watson, Crick, and Franklin were