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pressure is put on our politicians by a public demanding a more open scientific culture, then change will come. This needs to become an issue of general concern to our society, a political issue and a social issue that is understood by everyone to be of critical importance. Yyou can an help achieve this by using your personal power, your connections, and your imagination to lobby politicians and grant agencies to make policies that encourage openness. (I’ve listed some organizations already doing this in the “Selected Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading” section at the end of this book.) What types of knowledge will we, as a society, expect and incentivize scientists to share with the world? Will we continue with our current approach? Or will we choose to create a scientific culture that embraces the open sharing of knowledge, the development of new tools that extend our problem-solving ability and speed up scientific discovery?

The steps I have just described are all small steps. But together they will create an irreversible movement toward more open ways of doing science. The inventor and scientist Daniel Hillis has observed that “there are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-year terms—which everyone does—but they’re easy if you think in fifty-year terms.” The problem of open science is a problem of this type. Today, creating an open scientific culture seems to require an impossible change in how scientists work. But by taking small steps we can gradually cause a major cultural change.

The Era of Networked Science

I wrote this book with the goal of lighting an almighty fire under the scientific community. We’re at a unique moment in history: for the first time we have an open-ended ability to build powerful new tools for thought. We have an opportunity to change the way knowledge is constructed. But the scientific community, which ought to be in the vanguard, is instead bringing up the rear, with most scientists clinging to their existing way of working, and failing to support those who seek a better way. As with the first open science revolution, as a society we need to actively avert this tragedy of lost opportunity, by incentivizing and, when appropriate, compelling scientists to contribute in new ways. I believe that with hard work and dedication, we have a good chance of completely revolutionizing science.

When we look back at the second half of the seventeenth century, we can see that one of the great changes of that time was the invention of modern science. When the history of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries is written, we’ll see this as the time in history when the world’s information was transformed from an inert, passive state, and put into a unified system that brings that information alive. The world’s information is waking up. And that change gives us the opportunity to restructure the way scientists think and work, and so to extend humanity’s problem-solving ability. We are reinventing discovery, and the result will be a new era of networked science that speeds up discovery, not in one small corner of science, but across all of science. That reinvention will deepen our understanding of how the universe works and help us address our most critical human problems.

Appendix: The Problem Solved by the Polymath Project

The Polymath Project aimed to prove a mathematical result known as the density Hales-Jewett (DHJ) theorem. Although the proof of DHJ is complex, the basic statement can be understood by anyone. Take a look at the following three-by-three grid:

I’ve marked seven of the squares on the grid with a dot; as you can see, it’s possible to draw a line through three of those dots. By contrast, the configuration in the following picture is line-free—you can’t draw a line through any three of the dots:

If you play around a bit, you’ll discover that this configuration is the largest possible line-free configuration. In particular, if you mark seven dots on the grid, then no matter how you place the dots, it is always possible to