{"id":7931,"date":"2013-05-10T09:40:38","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T13:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=7931"},"modified":"2013-05-10T09:40:38","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T13:40:38","slug":"wolfgang-pauli-father-of-the-arxiv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/05\/10\/wolfgang-pauli-father-of-the-arxiv\/","title":{"rendered":"Wolfgang Pauli, Father of the arXiv"},"content":{"rendered":"

The book-in-progress<\/a> (which is coming along, albeit slowly, thanks for asking) is built around making analogies between scientific discoveries and ordinary activities. This necessarily means telling a lot of historical stories, which is both good and bad. The bad part is that actual history is way messier than the streamlined version you get to use if you’re primarily trying to explain the science, and I feel some obligation to do this right as much as possible, thus making work for myself. The good part is I’m reading a lot of narrative history of science stuff, which is kind of fun. In particular, I’ve been reading a lot about the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED).<\/p>\n

One of the things that struck me about this was how collegial the whole enterprise seems to have been. A lot of versions of the story cast it as a titanic conflict between Feynman and Schwinger, but they don’t seem to have had an intense personal rivalry. In one of the books I’ve read recently, Feynman even recalls talking to Schwinger as the only redeeming element of his disastrous presentation at the Pocono Manor conference. There’s a notable absence of back-stabbing and protracted priority disputes– everybody talked to everybody else, and there’s much more a sense of a shared enterprise of discovery than a competition for scientific supremacy. (I was particularly struck by this when somebody re-tweeted a link to this post calling for an academic science tv drama<\/a>— the culture described doesn’t quite fit with what I’ve been reading.) Max Born sort of sulks for a long time over his relative lack of recognition, but he’s about the only one who seems to have this as a major concern. And when Tomonaga writes to Oppenheimer with his own QED calculation of the Lamb shift, Oppenheimer is quick to publicize it and see that Tomonaga gets recognition as a co-creator of the theory, and everybody happily goes along.<\/p>\n

The other striking thing is how interconnected the whole business is. The community of people working on quantum mechanics and QED isn’t all that large, and they all appear to have been in nearly constant communication. Everybody writes letters to everybody else, sharing preliminary results, speculating about next steps, and commenting on the ideas of others. Some of the commentary is a little sharp– Wolfgang Pauli had an acid tongue– but again, it comes off very much as a community endeavor, rather than a distributed competition. (Pauli also seems to have produced an exceptionally voluminous correspondence, or perhaps was just better at keeping track of his letters than the others, because every story seems to come back to a letter Pauli wrote to somebody, or vice versa.)<\/p>\n

I’ve wondered half-seriously in the past how it is that the arxiv came out of physics<\/a>, given the reputation physicists have for arrogance. My recent reading makes me think that this was actually a very natural outcome. As you know even if your name’s not Bob, the arxiv grew out of a preprint-sharing network among high-energy theorists in the 1980’s, but that seems to be a natural continuation of the letter-writing networks of the 1920’s and 1930’s.<\/p>\n

Of course, having also read some history about biology and chemistry in the latter half of the 1800’s, it’s also clear that this is kind of anomalous– there are nasty and protracted arguments and underhanded tactics in those fields going back just as far as the data-sharing in physics. Which comes back to the arxiv being kind of exceptional, as I’ve written before. In terms of getting open-access policies and so on adopted, I really do think the important question is not why fields other than physics haven’t adopted preprint-sharing, but what it was about physics that created the proto-arxiv in the first place. <\/p>\n

(Niels Bohr was arguably more central to the communications network of the quantum enterprise than Pauli, I think, and in that sense might belong in the post title instead. Having met Paul Ginsparg a few times, though, I think his general attitude is probably closer to Pauli’s. At least, the comparison amused me, which is good enough for a blog post title…)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The book-in-progress (which is coming along, albeit slowly, thanks for asking) is built around making analogies between scientific discoveries and ordinary activities. This necessarily means telling a lot of historical stories, which is both good and bad. The bad part is that actual history is way messier than the streamlined version you get to use… Continue reading Wolfgang Pauli, Father of the arXiv<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,67,80,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-book_writing","category-history_of_science","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}