Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [88]
Like open access and citizen science, science blogs are an institution that is changing the role of science in society. I won’t talk in all that much detail about science blogging here. The reason is that ever since blogging (in all its forms, not just science blogging) began in the 1990s, there’s been a lot of brouhaha about it—I’ve lost track of the number of magazine and newspaper articles I’ve seen saying “Blogs are revolutionizing politics!”; “And journalism!”; “No, they’re not!”; and so on. I don’t want to cover that well-trodden ground again. But I do want to describe a few examples giving the flavor of how science blogs can establish a new type of relationship between the scientific community and the broader community, complementing and extending ideassuch as open access.
One remarkable aspect of the most widely read science blogs is their popularity. Pharyngula, a blog run by biologist Paul Myers from the University of Minnesota, receives over 100,000 visits per day, comparable to the circulation of a leading daily newspaper in a large metropolitan center such as the Des Moines Register or the Salt Lake Tribune. This is not bad for one guy writing in his spare time—and far more attention than all but the most famous mainstream print journalists regularly receive.
Pharyngula is the most popular science blog, but many other science blogs have thousands or tens of thousands of regular readers. My vote for the best blog in the world is the blog of Terence Tao, a Fields Medal-winning mathematician based at UCLA. (We met Tao briefly earlier, as one of the participants in the Polymath Project.) Tao’s blog contains hundreds of posts. Some of the posts are lighthearted (“Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider”), but most of the posts contain highly technical mathematics. Just to give you the flavor, posts include “Finitary consequences of the invariant subspace problem” and “The transference principle, and linear equations in primes.” Although the titles look forbidding to non-mathematicians, for mathematicians these posts are remarkably clear and insightful expositions of difficult topics, often containing many thoughtful original insights. Despite its technical nature, more than 10,000 people read Tao’s blog. The comments section reveals that while many of these people are professional mathematicians, many are also students, sometimes in remote locations. Some of the commenters have little mathematical background: they are just interested people who wish to learn more and who enjoy being exposed directly to the thinking of one of the world’s leading scientists.
What should we make of science blogging? Is it going to transform the world? In its current form, I don’t think so. Instead, the way to think about science blogging is as a harbinger of what’s possible. Science blogs show in nascent form what can happen when you remove the barriers separating scientists from the rest of the community, and enable a genuine two-way flow of information. A friend of mine who was fortunate enough to attend Princeton University once told me that the best thing about attending Princeton wasn’t the classes, or even the classmates he met. Rather, it was meeting some of the extraordinarily accomplished professors, and realizing that they were just people—people who sometimes got upset over trivial things, or who made silly jokes, or who made boneheaded mistakes, or who had faced great challenges in their life, and who somehow, despite their faults and challenges, very occasionally managed to do something extraordinary. “If they can do it, I can do it too” was the most important lesson my friend learned.
What’s important then is that blogs make it possible for anyone with an internet connection to