When Scientific Publishing was Withheld 52
karvind writes "Article in Physical Review Focus reveals the silence practiced by Physical Review during WWII to delay publishing results related to fission, the splitting of an atom's nucleus accompanied by a prodigious release of energy. From the article: Because of fears that Germany would use American research to pursue an atomic weapon, the Physical Review agreed to withhold reports of significant advances. It was not until several months after an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan, that Phys. Rev. published the paper announcing the discovery of plutonium, the material used in that bomb. Physicist Abraham Pais later called the journal's silence on the subject 'the most important nonevent in the history of the Physical Review.'"
Science is a lot more ideological than you'd think (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, peer-reviewed outfits are still ran by humans. Neural nets have been essentially blocked by the nonparametric statistics community for a long while -- leading to the bizarre situation of having electrical engineers understand a lot about time-series prediction that the people who are actually involved with it don't -- and is only now making advance as econometricians -- who typically develop parametric statistical methods and then try to fit everything to their methods -- are adopting it, partly because of sheer job-market pressure.
And all that is in a pretty technical, numbers-in-numbers-out field.
So you pick up a peer-reviewed rag in economics -- and if economics isn't science, medicine isn't either --, and it risks having at least three types of ideological bias: a political one (generally from the more-or-less-state-intervention kind), a established-scientific-practices one (people already know their field, and getting game-theorists to accept category theory and arrow-chasing proofs is proving hard) _and_ a schools-competition one (possibly linked to political issues, since hyping up schools linked to free-market stances will harm the more-intervention camp).
Yes, you could say that physics has less politics involved. But when you're dealing with the very nature of "actual stuff", you are bumping into very deep philosophical stances that may be much harder to shake than political convictions with the scientific process only. I know many people who have come to adopt a more-free-market POV after being exposed to general equilibrium and microeconomic theory, but it's harder to convince people -- Einstein wouldn't -- that the universe is ultimately stochastic, or that our behaviour might be evolutionarily stable and a product of our genes, etc. etc.
In the end, economics has nothing like the controversy on sociobiology. Outside radical circles who have been essentially ignoring economic theory since uncertainty and assymetric information have come into play in the models, there is a very deep consensus among economists at least in the basic issues -- from Paul Krugman to Arthur Laffer.
Politics is just politics. We have our own interests, and we act to defend them. And after a while, people start to analyze what people do in the defense of their interests, and the action of special-interest groups, rent-seeking behaviour, etc. becomes clear.
Personal philosophies are a lot muddier. And physics touches the bottom of them.
Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th (Score:1, Insightful)
Economics does not use the scientific method of observations-hypotheseis-experiment-revisions. Medicine is willing to use a clinical trial where some part of the observed population gets new treatments and others don't. Economists seldom do this, with an all or nothing approach to changes in economic structures that prevent proper scientific analysis.
Re: economics is not a science (Score:1, Informative)
is astronomy? is paleotology? is geography?
How do you do experiments in paleobiology?
Granted, much of econ. is layered with preconceptions; much of it IS covet , unconscious, politics.
Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th (Score:3, Informative)
There are two problems with this argument:
Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th (Score:2)
they ensured that we behaved rationally by giving cash payouts tied to our economic success in the experimental system.
I've participated in economic experimental games like that, too. Rational behavior sounds like something that should be easy to gauge, but it's not.
The problem is that, in the real world, there is this constantly shifting layer of perception that participants have of cost and of reward. By changing peoples' perceptions, it doesn't matter too much that they have this rational decision-ma
Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the reasons Neural Networks [wikipedia.org] were viewed with some doubt was because of their "pseudo-black box" nature. Train it enough and you will get a model that gives you a good fit for your data, but you have no insight as to interpret the results, not least because you will almost never get the same model twice from the same data (the weights will be different every time you train them).
The neural networks idea sounded interesting because of the "cool" biological analogue it has with neurons firing in your brain (and it had interesting jargon to boot).
But if you look at its mathematical description it boils down to doing a simple regression/curve fitting with a limited nonlinear model that uses exponential functions (known in the NN community as "activation functions") like the sigmoid etc. (You can actually derive this if you write out the equations for a simple 1-2 layer neural network).
It spits out data that fits the curve, but tells you nothing about the correlations inside them. In the 1980s, people were attracted to it because of its simplicity and the fact that it seemed to be feasible way of mimicking a human's pattern matching abilities. It was all the rage back then. In the 1990s or so, people started to become aware of its weaknesses and began to look at it more circumspectly.
To give you an example, most credit card companies use Neural Networks to approve credit card applications. They pump your application data through a trained model (based on past classifications done by humans), and it spits out an "Approved" or "Not Approved" flag.
Unfortunately, you have no idea why a certain application is approved or not approved. A neural network model can't tell you that. It's only designed to give you an answer based on the its training weights, i.e. it only models the relationship between Y and X, and not the Y and X spaces themselves.
Instead, if you apply a multivariate statistical method such as PLS [mcmaster.ca] (via a NIPALS algorithm), the model will tell you how things are correlated (in a easy to interpret graphical fashion). It will pretty much be doing the same thing as the neural network, except that it models the X and Y spaces simultaneously, compensates for missing data by deriving from the correlation structures; all this by transforming the variables into a latent variable space that captures the maximum covariance in the data. All the equations are transparent and have a solid basis in the mathematics of linear transformations and projections.
And you get the same model each time, so it can tell you exactly why your credit card application was turned down. (Too many unpaid bills, for instance)
It is easy to become enamored of black-box methods (I know I was), but ultimately the methods that survive are the ones built on rigorous mathematical/scientific foundations. (not always possible, especially in areas like economics, but it is something to strive for)
Most ideas and theories get superseded over time, but black-box methods and theories produce the most controversies. Sometimes you can't blame the community for being a little skeptical of them.
Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th (Score:4, Informative)
That doesn't mean the usual neural net training algorithms are able to achieve that representation, but it's still a strong result, and it mostly justifies neural nets being increasingly looked at seriously at nonparametric (without individual input effect parameters as an usual OLS model would yield) statistics.
All in all, I do have a lot of faith in the future of nonparametric methods. They might be no substitute of empirical experiment (and that's what the parametric statistical methods that comprise econometrics strive for), but the sheer success of neural nets in spite of their lukewarm academic reception shows they can be quite useful.
Re:Science is a lot more ideological than you'd th (Score:2, Informative)
If you're talking about Cybenko's '89 paper, I believe you misunderstand the result. The main theorem simply says that for any continuous function f on the interval and any epsilon>0,
Re:Medicine is a profession, not a science (Score:3, Insightful)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:5, Informative)
For people who like this subject matter and want to read more about the history of the development of atomic bombs (including the history of early 20th century atomic physics), I can recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb [amazon.com] by Richard Rhodes. Solid history _and_ good writing.
I bought it after it was recommended in some other Slashdot post, and loved it.
Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
That is a very excellent book. In fact, I believe the main point of this article is dealt with in that book. The import of this was that until that point, scientists had been much more isolated from these types of political interventions. As a previous poster here has pointed out, this intervention is more common now.
I think something else to consider with this was that a lot of the people pushing to keep the Germans in the dark had a good idea of what they were dealing with. Many of these scientists were former residents of Germany, Italy, and some of the other countries of Europe. They felt it to their core that Hitler would stop at nothing and would use all the means at his disposal to win. They were firm in their belief that if Hitler got the bomb, he would use it without hesitation. It seemed to them that there were two ways to defeat this.
First, keeping Hitler in the dark as much as possible. Reports after the fact on Hitler Germany's progess with a bomb show that they were pretty well in the dark. Secondly, they thought they should work towards building a bomb as quickly as possible to defeat Hitler. They were pretty succuessful on that point too.
Another good book by Rhodes that continues from where "Making the Atomic Bomb leaves off is Dark Sun: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/068Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:1, Insightful)
But they seemed to overlook the fact that their country would use it without hesitation.
Eventual winners blowing up the world = heroes.
Eventual losers blowing up the world = terrorists.
Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:2)
Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:1)
Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:3, Interesting)
The english basically captured the core scientists which worked on the bomb, and put them into a camp under surveillance. After they got the news that the US had the bomb (the war was over by then) they seriously sat together and figured out how things were working correctly withing a few days (they did not have anything to prevent anymore and basically coul
Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:1)
Of course building a bomb from scratch is orders of magnitude more difficult than observing a bomb and figuring out how it works. It's the classic difference between designing and bringing to market a new product and reverse-engineering it. The
Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:2)
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Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:2)
Oh, puhleeze.
Those scientists were acting just like (most) every other German: "I didn't do it. I didn't know what was going on. It's not my fault! Boo Hoo."
Re:The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Score:2)
In spite of this justification he got shunned by his peers until his death. Many of his peers were Jewish and could never belive him.
Heisenberg made a famous trip to Copenhagen during the war to meet with Niels Bohr. No one knows what the two men talked about, but Bohr (who was anti-Nazi) was reputedly
The real lesson is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Amateur paranoiacs cannot hope to compete with professional ones.
Re:The real lesson is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that many of the scientists involved were Jews who had left Europe to get as far from the Nazi's as they could (Albert Einstein, Leo Szelard, Edward Teller, Enriqo Fermi* and many others)
* Fermi was not Jewish, but his wife was.
Re:The real lesson is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The real lesson is... (Score:3, Informative)
"what really made it easy for the Soviets to build their own bomb was knowing that it would work. It wasn't even certain whether the research would take anywhere, whether an atomic bomb was possible at all."
To anyone who is interested in the history of the project and its continuation in hydrogen bomb effort, I strongly recommend Gregg Herken's "Brotherhood of the Bo
Re:The real lesson is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The real lesson is... (Score:5, Insightful)
"A Soviet scientist deduced from the Americans' silence on the topic that they were pursuing an atomic bomb. The Soviets soon followed suit."
It's an information theory problem. Before the war, there was a steady stream of related work that was being published. During the war, that dried up. The lack of information is information in itself.
Unfortunately, there really wasn't a suitable way around this. They couldn't publish material that would help the enemy. They couldn't publish misinformation in its place, as all the physicists reading would call shenanigans. A pre-emptive approach of not allowing publishing of this nature at all that might have been implemented before the war would stifle the scientific process. There's no real way to combat this kind of information leak.
Re:The real lesson is... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The real lesson is... (Score:2)
In Stalin's *ahem* Soviet Russia, there were two kinds of people: the paranoid and the dead.
Some silence is bought (Score:3, Interesting)
Private interests get in the game too though. Drug studies are squelched if the sponsors don't like the results, and people wind up dying. Decades-old industry studies of smoking tobacco never saw the light of day until recently. You always hear rumors about car and energy companies not telling all they know about more efficient motors and fuels, but "those are just rumors."
Re:slightly OT: nitpick (Score:4, Informative)
Plutonium was being produced in the Oklo natural nuclear reactor that was running in Gabon 2 billion years ago. It had decayed away by the time we showed up on the scene. See this [curtin.edu.au], for example.
We learned of it by making it, but nature had done it long before us.
Re:slightly OT: nitpick (Score:2)
It also gives us some info on how fission decay products move when bu
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Re:Klaus Fuchs (Score:1)