Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [45]
Some readers—especially, perhaps, those who have worked as scientists—may read the above paragraphs and think they sound like a pipe dream. “Why,” they may ask, “would those experimentalists ever help one another in this way? In the real world, they’ll never share the key ideas that are their competitive advantage.” Today, this is true, and we’ll return to this problem in different guises repeatedly in the coming chapters. But as our understanding deepens, we’ll see that while it is a challenging problem, it’s not insurmountable. For now, though, we’ll defer discussion.
These are just a few ideas to stimulate your thinking about how online tools and collective intelligence can be used to change science. Of course, far more is possible. Imagine completely open source approaches to doing research. Imagine a connected online web of scientific knowledge that integrates and connects data, computer code, chains of scientific reasoning, descriptions of open problems, and beyond. That web of scientific knowledge could incorporate video, virtual worlds, and augmented reality, as well as more conventional media, such as papers. And it would be tightly integrated with a scientific social web that directs scientists’ attention where it is most valuable, releasing enormous collaborative potential.
In part 2 of this book we’ll explore, in concrete terms, how the era of networked science is coming about today. We’ll see, for example, how vast databases containing much of the world’s knowledge are being mined for discoveries that would elude any unaided human. We’ll see how online tools enable us to build new institutions that act as bridges between science and the rest of society in new ways, and that can help redefine the relationship between science and society. The place where these ideas are being most fully realized is in basic science, and so the focus in part 2 is on basic science—by contrast, applied science is often carried out by small groups working in secret, inside private companies, and that secrecy limits their ability to scale up collaboration. But even in basic science, there are serious obstacles to be overcome. Simple ideas such as collaboration markets, open source wiki-like research papers, and sharing of data and computer code face considerable cultural obstacles. We’ll develop the idea that for networked science to reach its full potential, it must be open science, based on a culture in which scientists openly and enthusiastically share all their data and their scientific knowledge. And, finally, we’ll see how that more open scientific culture can be created.
PART 2
Networked Science
CHAPTER 6
All the World’s Knowledge
Don Swanson seems an unlikely person to make medical discoveries. A retired but still active information scientist at the University of Chicago,has no medical training, does no medical experiments, and has never had a laboratory. Despite this, he’s made several significant medical discoveries. One of the earliest was in 1988, when he investigated migraine headaches, and discovered evidence suggesting that migraines are caused by magnesium deficiency. At the time the idea was a surprise to other scientists studying migraines, but Swanson’s idea was subsequently tested and confirmed in multiple therapeutic trials by traditional medical groups.
How is it that someone without any medical training could make such a discovery? Although Swanson had none of the conventional credentials of medical research, what he did have was a clever idea. Swanson believed that scientific knowledge had grown so vast that important connections between subjects were going unnoticed, not because they were especially subtle or hard to grasp, but because no one had a broad enough understanding of science to notice those connections: in a big enough haystack, even a 50-foot needle may be hard to find. Swanson hoped to uncover such hidden connections using a