I'm an interesting kind of guy. I wasn't planning to do two sociology of science postings in a row. But I notice that Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance has blogged about tweaking the astrophysics section of the physics pre-print archive. For anyone who’s not come across it, the archive (always known as arXiv, actually) is where physicists put their papers for colleagues to scrutinise. In some ways it has subverted the peer review system, or at least made it much more informal. That’s probably a good thing, by the way – the formal peer review process, where journals send out prospective papers to other scientists for their opinion, is a little outdated in many ways. I’ll save why for another post.
Sean’s idea was to compartmentalise it a bit better. As he says, “The problem with science is that there’s just too damn much of it. Every weekday, when one peeks at the new listings on astro-ph, one is faced with 40 to 50 new abstracts to read.”
He’s right. Astro-ph has SO much on it. And, as the man points out, you can’t possibly look at all of it in any meaningful way.
And that’s just astrophysics, remember. You could see it as just the way it is. But is it a problem? I recently wrote for New Scientist that it is. To many people’s disgust, I put forward the suggestion that much of science is boring, consisting of mediocre, tedious advances.
Those are not my words, by the way. They’re something a Spanish philosopher called Jose Ortega Y Gasset (he's the dude in the picture) wrote in 1930. I came across them because Erwin Schrödinger mentioned it in a lecture he gave in 1951 (see – aren’t I well read?!), and his warnings about the consequences have a bitter salience today.
To quote myself (file under “self-indulgence”):
Finding a way to keep science accessible is vital, Schrödinger said, because "the masses" are more powerful than many scientists would care to admit. With uncanny prescience, he pointed out that they decide issues such as what gets included in school curricula. According to Ortega and Schrödinger, public disengagement from science is one step in a journey that includes, for example, allowing creationism into the science classroom, and ends with the disappearance of science from culture.
What do we do about this? One thing I’m suggesting is a better filter for what gets funded. It would be great to try to find out every little thing about every little thing, but, a) there is a finite amount of money available, and, b) some things just aren’t that interesting, really.
I know, I know, it’s all a matter of taste. But if the taste is shared only by a tiny minority of people whose careers are tied up with that field, how can that rate as genuinely interesting? If certain aspects of the astrophysics section of the arXiv aren’t even interesting to other astrophysicists, does that tell us something about the over-specialisation (can I say boring-ness?) of science?
(A useful digest of some interesting stuff on the arXiv appears on this blog, by the way).
Apparently, one of the barriers to compartmentalising the astro-ph section of the arXiv was that “certain astrophysicists who will remain nameless took an “eat your vegetables” approach to the problem, insisting that it was good for anyone to look at every single astro-ph abstract if they were possibly interested in any of them.”
I mean, pur-lease! That kind of attitude – that you “just damn well should be interested in science” is exactly why so many young people seem to shrug their shoulders at the idea of a career in science.
I don’t have a solution to the over-specialisation issue – I’m not convinced there is one, or that there even can be one – but it’s something we should at least be thinking about.
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