Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [42]
The situation in quantum gravity is unusual. In most areas of science, scientists can compare two competing explanations of a phenomenon to an experiment, and realize that one explanation is right (or, at least, not ruled out by the experiment), and the other is wrong. Or a scientist can point out a hole in another’s experimental procedure, and everyone will agree that, yes, that really is a hole, it doesn’t come up to the expected standard. But in quantum gravity the phenomena being studied are so remote that we don’t yet know how to do experiments—it’s still all theory. And developing the basic theory is so challenging that picking out starting assumptions has become to some extent a matter of personal taste, in a manner similar to the fine arts. It’s these highly unusual conditions that have prevented the development of a shared praxis. By contrast, in most other fields of science, there is a strongly held shared praxis. And so science gives us a marvelous opportunity to amplify our collective intelligence.
Using Collective Intelligence in Science
In part 2 of this book, we’ve seen how online tools can be used to amplify collective intelligence, both making groups sstring r and making smarter groups. As we come to the end of part 1, let’s use those ideas to imagine some of the ways online tools could be used to amplify collective intelligence in science. We’ll take a personal point of view, trying to imagine a few of the ways these tools might impact the day-to-day life of an individual scientist. In the chapters to come we’ll see how some of these dreams are being realized and even exceeded today. We’ll also see how other parts of these dreams are blocked by current social practices within science—and how that can be changed.
Imagine it’s a few years in the future, and you’re a theoretical physicist working at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in Pasadena. Each morning you begin your work by sitting down at your computer, which presents to you a list of ten requests for your assistance, a list that’s been distilled especially for you from millions of such requests filed overnight by scientists around the world. Out of all those requests, these are the problems where you are likely to have maximal comparative advantage. Today, one of the requests immediately catches your eye. A materials scientist in Budapest, Hungary, has been working on a project to develop a new type of crystal. During the project an unanticipated difficulty has come up involving a very specialized type of problem: figuring out the behavior of particles as they hop around randomly (“diffuse”) on a triangular latticework. Unfortunately for the materials scientist, diffusion is a subject they don’t know much about. You, in turn, don’t know much about crystals, but you are an expert on the mathematics of diffusion, and, in fact, you’ve previously solved several research problems similar to the problem puzzling the materials scientist. After mulling over the diffusion problem for a few minutes, you’re sure that the problem will fall easily to mathematical techniques you know well, but which the materials scientist probably doesn’t know at all.
You message the materials scientist with an outline of a solution to their problem. Over the next few days you communicate back and forth, jointly fleshing out a solution, filling in many details, and translating your mathematical ideas into the language of materials science. Much work on the original project remains to be done, but a critical bottleneck has been overcome. Your reward is a happy collaborator, eventual coauthorship on a paper, and the pleasure of learning a little about the physics of crystals and how it relates to your expertise in diffusion. Your collaborator’s reward is to save hundreds of hours they otherwise would have spent becoming expert enough to solve the diffusion problem. The community as a whole is also