A New Year's Tale: And the Years of His Life Were 900

 

  

A story from the old Soviet Union, written by the Russian writer Vladimir Dudintsev, still teaching us things today. And here is a written version from a 2013 post.

 
Some 50 years ago, I received as a Christmas present a book titled "Russian Science Fiction." All the stories in that book made a deep impression on me, but there was one that has remained in my mind more than the others; a curious story titled "A New Year's Tale".

I was, maybe, 12 at that time and, of course, I couldn't understand everything of that story and I didn't pay attention to the name of the author. But, as time went by, I didn't forget it; rather, it became entrenched in my mind, progressively acquiring more meaning and more importance. I reread it not long ago, and it came back to my mind during a recent trip to Russia. So, let me tell you this story as I remember it.

"A New Year's Tale" tells of one year of life of the protagonist, a researcher in a scientific laboratory somewhere in the Soviet Union. Dudintsev manages to tell the story without ever giving specific details about anything: no place names, no names of the characters, not even of the protagonist. It is a feat of literary virtuosity; it gives the story an atmosphere of a fairy tale but, at the same time, it is very, very specific.

It took me time before I could understand the hints that Dudintsev gives all over the text, but after many trips to Russia, everything fell in place. It is curious how Dudintsev managed to catch so well the atmosphere of a research lab in the Soviet Union; he was not a scientific researcher. But that's what makes a great storyteller, after all: understanding what one is describing - and feeling something for it.

The story starts with a debate - rather, a quarrel - that the protagonist has with someone termed "a provincial academic" (we are not told his name). This provincial academic should be nothing more than a nuisance, but the protagonist can't avoid engaging in the debate. He understands that he is losing time, that he should be doing something more useful, more important. But he just can't sit down and do his job.

While the protagonist is entangled in this useless quarrel, the chief of the laboratory (again, we are not told his name) dabbles in archeology and one day he tells his coworkers of some work of his somewhere in the Caucasus, where they found an ancient tomb. There was an owl engraved on the tombstone and an inscription that they could decipher. It says "...and the years of his life were 900...."

Now, what could that mean? Could the man buried there have lived 900 years? No, of course not. But then, what does the inscription mean? Well, someone says, that must mean that this man spent his life so well and so fully that it was like his years had been 900.

The discussion goes on. What does it mean to live such a full life? The researchers try to find an answer but, at some moment, they hear the voice of someone who usually keeps silent at these reunions. We are told that he is from far away, not Russian, that is. We can imagine that this man doesn't have a Russian name, but we are not told names. So, he is an outsider and he comes with a completely different viewpoint; he is "the foreign scientist" even though in the old Soviet Union, theoretically, there was no such distinction. "You see, comrades," he says, "it is very simple. To live a full life, you must always choose the greatest satisfactions, the highest joys you can find."

At this point, we hear the voice of the political commissioner of the lab. Apparently, there was usually someone in the scientific academies in the Soviet Union who was in charge of making sure that Soviet Scientists would not fall into doing decadent capitalist science. So, he stands up and he tells the foreign scientist, "Well, comrade, don't you think one should also work for the people or something like that?" And the foreign scientist answers, "You are so backward, comrade. Don't you understand? The greatest satisfaction, the highest joy one can have in life is exactly that: working for the people!"

After that the discussion is over, the protagonist of the story reflects on the words of the foreign scientist and he resolves to start doing something serious in his life. He decides to start doing experiments, advance his theory. We are not told exactly what he is doing, but we understand that he is working on something important; research that has to do with capturing and storing solar light. And he manages to work on that for some time. Then, his colleagues bring to him another paper written by his provincial antagonist. So, he feels he has to answer that, and then the provincial academician writes a response.... and the protagonist finds himself entangled again into this argument.

Things are back to the silly normalcy of before, but then something happens. The protagonist finds that he is being stalked. Someone, or something, is following him all the time. When he sees it in full he discovers that it is an owl. A giant owl, almost as big as a man, looking at him. He thinks it is a hallucination, which of course it must be. But he keeps seeing this owl over and over.

So, the protagonist goes to see a doctor and he tells him of the owl. The doctor pales. After a thorough physical examination, the doctor tells him: "you have one year to live, more or less." We are not told of what specific sickness the protagonist suffers. He asks, "but why the owl?" And the doctor answers, "we are studying that. You are not the only one. The owl is a symptom." Then, the doctor looks at the protagonist straight in his eyes and he says, "I can tell you something. Those who see the owl, have a chance to be saved."

In the meantime, there had been a long discussion between the protagonist and the foreign scientist, the one who had so well silenced the political commissioner. So, the foreign scientist had told to the protagonist his story, obliquely, yes, but clearly understandable. His fellow countrymen had not liked the idea that he had left the country to become a scientist. They are described as gangsters and criminals, but we have a feeling that there was something more at stake than just petty crimes. This man had made a choice and that had meant to make a clean break from his country and his culture; it had meant to accept the new Soviet Communist society. Now, he was spending his time in this new world trying to get his "greatest satisfactions and highest joys" by working for the people. And, because of that, his former countrymen had condemned him to death. So, he had changed his name and his identity, and he had even surgically changed his face to become unrecognizable. But he knew that "they" were looking for him and they would find him at some moment.

So, the destiny of the protagonist and of the foreign scientist are somehow parallel, they both have a limited time. After having seen the doctor, the protagonist understands the situation and he rushes to search for the foreign scientist. They can work together, they can join forces, in this way, maybe they can....  but in horror, he discovers that the foreign scientist has been killed. 

In panic, the protagonist desperately looks for the notes he had collected over the years. But the cleaning lady tells him that she had used them to start the fire in the stove. She had no idea that they could have been important. The protagonist feels like he is walking in a nightmare. Just one year and he has lost his notes. He starts from scratch.... his great discovery.... how can he do? Yet, he decides to try.

He becomes absorbed in his work. He works harder and harder. Staying in the lab night and day and, when he goes home, he keeps working. His colleagues note the change; they are surprised that he doesn't react anymore to the attacks of the provincial academician, but he doesn't care (which is, by the way, a good lesson on how to handle our modern Internet flames). He still sees the owl; always bigger and coming closer to him, the owl has become something of a familiar creature, almost a friend.

Then, someone appears. It is a woman, described as having "well-formed shoulders" (of course, we are not told her name!). The protagonist recognizes her. It is not the first time he has seen her. He remembers having seen her with the now dead foreign Scientist.

The protagonist has no time for a love story. He has to work. He tries to ignore the woman but he is also attracted to her. He can concede her just a few words. Ten minutes, maybe. So they talk and the woman tells him. "It is you, I recognize you! You can't fool me!" The protagonist remembers something that the foreign scientist had told him; that he had his face surgically changed to escape from his enemies. Now, this woman thinks that the protagonist is really her former lover, who changed again face and appearance and didn't tell that not even to her.

The protagonist tries to deny that he is the former lover of the woman but, curiously, he doesn't succeed, not even to himself. In a way, he becomes the other, acting like him in his complete immersion in his work. The protagonist discovers that the foreign scientist had assembled a complete laboratory at home, much better than the lab at the academy. So he moves there, with the woman with the well-formed shoulders (and the owl comes, too, perching on a branch just outside the window). Then, the protagonist even discovers that the foreign scientist was secretly copying his notes and he gave them to the woman, who has kept them for him. With these notes, he can gain months of work. Maybe he can make it in one year, maybe.....

The last part of the story goes on at a feverish pace. The protagonist becomes sicker and sicker; to the point that he has to stay in bed and it is the woman with the well-formed shoulders who takes up the work in the lab. And the owl perches on the bed head. But they manage to get some important results and that's enough to catch the attention of the lab boss. He orders everyone in the lab to come there and help the protagonist (and the woman with the well-formed shoulders) to move on with the experiments.

In the final scene, the year has ended and we see the protagonist in bed, dying. But his colleagues show him the results of the experiment: something so bright, so beautiful, unbelievably bright and beautiful. We are not told exactly what it is, anyway it is a way to catch sunlight in a compact form: a new form of energy, a new understanding of the working of the sun - we don't know, but it is something fantastic. Even the owl looks at that thing, curious. The protagonist hears the sound of bells from the window. A new year is starting. We are not told whether he lives or not, but in any case, it is a new beginning and, whatever it happens, they'll tell of him that the years of his life had been 900.

And here we are. You see, it is a magic story. It keeps your attention; you want to know if the protagonist lives or not and you want to know if he manages to make his great discovery. But it is also the story of the life and of the mind of scientists that I think is not easy to find in novels or short stories. It is curious that Dudintsev did so well because, as I said, he wasn't a scientist, he was a novelist. But he managed to catch so incredibly well the life of a scientist - of a scientist working in the Soviet Union, yes, but not just that. Dudintsev's portrait of science and scientists goes beyond the quirks of the old Soviet world.

Yes, in Soviet science there were things that look strange for us, such as having a political commissioner in the lab to watch what scientists are doing. But that's just a minor feature and today in the West we have plenty of different -- and heavier  -- constraints on what we do that don't involve a dumb political commissioner. The point is that scientists often work as if their life were to last just one year; at least during the productive time of their life; when they are trying to compress each year as if it were to be 900 years long. It is their lot: the search for the discovery, being so deeply absorbed in their work, being remote from everyone else; obsessed with owls that they alone can see.

And yet, Dudintsev's story is so universal that it goes beyond the peculiar mind of scientists. It is the story of all men, all over the world, of what we do and how we spend our life. And the key of the story is the woman with the well-formed shoulders. She recognizes her former lover in the protagonist, or she feigns to recognize him. It is him or it is not him - we are not told, but it doesn't matter. What matter is her devotion to her man. It is so touching: you perceive true love in this attitude. In the end, that's the key to the whole story: whatever we do in life, we do it for those we love.

Some of us are scientists, some aren't. But it is not a piece of bad advice to live your life as if you wanted each year to be 900 years long. And every new year is a new beginning.




 

The Decline of the West: More Evidence From Australia

Are climate scientists criminals?

There was a time, not long ago, when in the West we were proud of our scientific achievements, our rationality, our approach to knowledge. Maybe it was a little overstated, but there was something good in the Western pride and respect for science.

I don't know what happened that destroyed everything, but it happened. Scientists are rapidly becoming the laughingstock of politicians, insulted, threatened, and accused to be criminals conspiring against humankind for their personal gains.

It is clearly shown by this speech of a few days ago by Senator Malcolm Roberts of Australia. He thinks, evidently, that five minutes of low-level rhetoric by an incompetent politician are sufficient to destroy 50 years of work by thousands of competent scientists. He is not alone, unfortunately, but he is a good example of how politicians tend to create their own reality. At some moment, we will discover what the real reality is, but it may well turn out to be a very painful experience.


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Note: this is the direct transcript from the record of the speech by Mr. Roberts. In the version reported by Roberts himself in his youtube channel there are some differences: in Robert's transcript there are no references on Mann having criticized Jim Molan and the mention of the names of Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri, Gavin Schmidt. But the threats against climate scientists defined as "criminals" remained

How dare you, Michael Mann.

Last Monday, the infamous Michael Mann, fabricator of the completely discredited hockey stick temperature graph, appeared on the ABC programme "Q&A;" and teamed up with the ABC, to discredit an Australian hero, Jim Molan.

How dare you Michael Mann pretend you are scientific when you are not? How dare you Michael Mann for maligning a marvelous leader, Jim Molan, who has the courage to challenge the status quo and state a simple fact.

You come down here pretending you have evidence that carbon dioxide from human activity affects climate and needs to be cut when you have no such evidence.

How do I know?

Easy, you released papers that led to the infamous hockey stick graph, falsely fabricating high temperatures. Despite repeated requests from scientists, you refuse to hand over your data.

No evidence.

Scientifically, your claim should have been completely and immediately dismissed. The state of Virginia Attorney General asked for your data from the University of Virginia because your research was reportedly taxpayer-funded. Your University refused.

No evidence.

Didn't the court find it? Sorry, then you sued Professor Tim Ball, a real scientist, and then in court you refused to provide evidence to support your case.

No evidence.

Didn't the court find you in contempt? Regardless, your claim was dismissed, and you failed to provide any evidence. Yet Professor Ball's team provided plenty of solid statements and evidence from internationally reputable scientists.

You are the one in the climate gain scandals who wanted to hide the temperature data, decline, the temperature decline. Didn't you hide the evidence? You have sued people that dared to question you to shut them down, to stop the evidence.

You now say Senator Molan as a policymaker should ask some unnamed Australian scientists for their opinion. Name any such people with evidence proving human carbon dioxide affects climate variability.

After 21 years, you have still not released data for your hockey stick graph fabricating high temperatures, yet many people had completely debunked it. My understanding is that fraud can include the presentation of something that is not true with the intention of personal gain.

You claim you were awarded a Nobel Prize. That is false. You contributed to the UN's climate body, the IPCC, that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Note, that was not for science. After the UN IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it dropped your graph. And if that's shonky political body dropped it that really destroys, kills your credibility.

You have a record of serially misrepresenting climate, serially misrepresenting science, and serially misrepresenting humanity. The use of hydrocarbon fuels such as gas, coal, and oil has liberated humanity and saved the forest and whales that previously fueled civilization and human progress.

Your advocacy, your blind advocacy to stop their use is anti-human, anti-environment. It hurts our security and our sovereignty.

Now your host, the ABC, has been a blind supporter of an advocate for others misrepresenting climate and science, including the notorious Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri, Gavin Schmidt, people advocating for cutting hydrocarbon fuels, have branded those who dissent from your advocacy as climate criminals.

I believe, Mr. Mann that in the very near future, it is people like you who misrepresent science and climate that the public will see as climate criminals. None of you have ever presented the empirical evidence proving human production of carbon dioxide from our use of hydrocarbon fuels, hurts our environment and future.

You're here in Australia now, so I challenge you to a public debate on climate science and on the corruption of climate science. Secondly, all you need to do is provide me with the specific location of the empirical scientific evidence, the hard validated data within a logical scientific framework that proves cause and effect, and I will retract this speech.

Mr. Mann, I need specific publication titles, specific page numbers. No entity anywhere in the world has provided this.

Now don't bother to smear me or get someone to smear me, that has no effect on me. I love it. I use it to prove that those who smear only do so because they lack hard evidence.

How dare you Michael Mann, provide the evidence.




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A comment from Ugo Bardi's personal troll, Mr. Kunning Druger

"Mr. Bardi, if you hate our freedom so much, why don't you go live in Iran?"

Epistemology of Earthsea: Is the Universe a Machine?

 

Above, two characters of the Earthsea world: Ged and Vetch (Ged is the one with the scars on his face). Behind Ged, the Shadow. A wonderful image by Paul Duffield. 

I propose here a modified version of a post that I published last year on "Chimeras".  I argue here that all our troubles are epistemological in nature: we don't know how to find the truth. In the Earthsea series, Ursula Le Guin gave us some hints - although no solution - about this dilemma. 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Arthur C. Clarke)



Imagine that you have never been exposed to the thousands of years of accumulation of what we call "culture". Imagine that you are looking at the world with fresh eyes; as if seeing it for the first time. You see all sort of things: people, animals, rivers, rocks, building, mountains, and much more. And you try to make some sense of all that. So, you notice that some things move, grow, shrink, and change shape. There seems to be some hierarchy in this kind of entities; some move fast and some slow, some don't move at all, but that doesn't mean they never do (think of a volcano). You could think that all these things have a soul; that, in a way they are like you, there is a certain kinship in all things.

If things have a soul, there follows that you can speak to them. To people, you can talk and they talk back to you. Animals won't talk back to you but they may listen. You can talk to plants, streams, and rocks; who knows? They might be listening. You may well try to convince the sky to produce some rain when you need it. Praying, dancing, offering sacrifices. That's the origin of what we call "religion", that's a very, very old way of understanding the universe. The universe has a soul. It is a soul. It is a definition of God (or of the Gods).

But there is also another way of seeing the universe: it is to assume that it is a sort of a machine. A machine is not something you talk to; it is something you act upon. And if you act in the right way, it will react predictably and as expected. So, you may pray to get the benevolence of the soul of a great forest tree, but you may also chop it down with an axe. Predictably, the tree will fall after a sufficient number of chops. You can do the same with an enemy: if you hit his head with a battle axe, the results will be predictable. If you know the functioning of the machine, then you can make it behave as you want to. This is the origin of magic; that some also call "craft". Finding the rules that things follow gives you power on them. It is the origin of modern science.

Religion may be older than magic, but they seem to have been going in parallel in human history. Take one of the oldest Western pieces of literature, the Iliad, and you'll find Gods appearing on almost every page, but no wizard ever crosses them. Instead, in some of the earliest literature we have, the Sumerians left us plenty of healing recipes where they freely mix invocation to Gods with herbs and other substances that surely had some healing powers of their own.

In time, religion and magic diverged more and more to the point that most modern religions despise magic as evil (and some religions despise science for the same reason). Priests may well perform rituals to obtain something for the benefit of the faithful, but they are always careful to state that success or failure is never guaranteed. If you pray God you may ask to be cured of your ailment. If you are cured, then you are supposed to thank God for His benevolence. But if you get worse, then you are not supposed to blame God for that. The divine will is unfathomable and it may be argued that it is your fault because of some sin you committed that made you unworthy of God's benevolence.

Over history, magic took different paths. One was that of the Europan alchemists. They tended to renounce to all the dark incantations of old times and they became true empiricists, originators of what we call the "scientific method". Their theoretical basis was faulty and they lost a lot of time in tasks that today we recognize as impossible. But they were always in search of things that worked. Modern science is wary of recognizing their role, but the basic idea is the same: the world is a machine: you don't need Gods to operate on it. And, in a certain way, the daughter of alchemy, science, triumphed. In most of the Western World, people trust a doctor more than a priest; even though they may also pray God to give them a hand, just in case.

There is a problem with the universal machine, though. Magic, just as science, has no moral compass: the end result of magic doesn't depend on whether it is done for a good or a bad purpose. Science-based medicine will cure an evil person just as well as a good one, while the best modern technologies have created weapons that will kill anyone. And this is a big problem especially when science fails - and it does. While you can't sue priests (or God) for malpractice, you can and you do sue doctors. And modern science has been unable to maintain its promises and it can be seen as an evil form of black magic for having lost control on those that it did manage to deliver; think of nuclear energy while, at the same time, unable to reverse the damage it created in the form of climate change, pollution, and more disasters.

Now, let's go to Le Guin's series, Earthsea, and see what we can learn from a parallel world to ours. Earthsea is a society nearly fully based on magic, just as our modern world is nearly fully based on science. Earthsea is a machine all based on the "old speech" that plays the same role as mathematical models in our world. This old speech, in other words, is something like an instruction manual for the world machine. Then, the novel describes idealized scientists - portraited as wizards. They are benevolent, crafty, intelligent, and always worried about not doing damage to the equilibrium of things. One wishes our scientists were like that!

That allows Le Guin to dissect the dilemmas of science in a variety of narrative plots. The key of the whole series of Earthsea is that even wise mages have problems. One is that they can do very little; we see them mending broken vases, curing goats' infected udders, raising - sometimes - the 'magewind' to push boats onward, and curing human ailments only when they are not too serious. So, wizards are at times considered useless and rejected. One of the stories of the series deals with an age in which wizardry had fell from grace and was widely despised. Just like what may soon happen to science in our world.

True, the protagonist of most of the stories, Ged, also fights dragons, but dragons are not the real problem with magery in Earthsea. The problem is the same we have with science in our world: the lack of a moral compass. So, in the first story of the series, Ged's enemy is not a dragon but himself. And, later on, it will be another mage, turned evil.

Over and over, the mages of Earthsea are at loss on how to deal with the Otherworld; the realm of the dead. A realm that's alien to magic and to science, but that's the natural domain of religion. So, Earthsea is not a Godless world; it can't be. We are told that it was created by an entity called "Segoy" who may be is a dragon, or maybe a God. And it is hinted that there is something more; much more than that and at least one region of Earthsea, the Kargad Lands in the North, are described as dominated by a religious vision of the world. Initially, the Kargish are just pirates and barbarians, but then they take up power and importance in the stories, hinting that their view may be on a par - perhaps superior - to their crafty Southern Neighbors. It is like that: Earthsea is a real world, it is alive.

Maybe we should just read about Earthsea for the pure joy of doing that. Or, maybe, we can read it in order to learn something about the contradictions and the problems of our world. What's all our science for? Can it solve problems or does it just create more of them? Can we attain the "balance" that the wizards of Earthsea keep striving for? How can we keep our nuclear dragons for burning all of us to cinders? Can we survive the great transformation that we call "climate change" that was created by our scientists but that our scientists are unable to control, now? What should we do with our dull and arrogant wizards who think they know more than anyone else?

Will we ever know if the universe is a soul or a machine? Maybe not. Like Ged in his little ship, the Lookfar, "we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (*). It is our destiny to follow the great current that's taking us across the ocean of time to an unknown destination. Or maybe toward Earthsea.

(*) For those readers who live in Earthsea and may not have heard of "The Great Gatsby" by Scott Fitzgerald, that's where the quote comes from.

About Earthsea, see also this post of mine on Chimeras.

Are Trump's Climate Policies Backfiring?

Data from a recent Gallup poll. Something is moving in the climate wars and science seems to be winning.

Trump's presidency is generating a backfire in beliefs on climate change. A recent Gallup poll went somewhat unnoticed in the great noise of the 100 days date, but it shows a consistent increase in the belief that climate change is real, it is caused by human actions, and it is dangerous. See the figure above, and also this one:




In an earlier post, I had defined the situation with the public opinion as "trench warfare in the climate wars", with neither side being able to gain a significant advantage over the other. But now, with Trump president, the deadlock seems to be over. The Gallup polls never reported such a clear majority of Americans seeing the climate situation in the right terms.

So, what's going on? I can think that Trump's heavy hand in punishing climate science and climate scientists is correctly perceived by the public as ideologically minded and dangerous - and many Americans don't like it. Scientists are seen as the victims of a political persecution and that is causing an increase of trust in science.

The situation may evolve even more in favor of climate science as Donald Trump becomes less and less popular. A significant fraction of Americans are still trusting him, but that trust may soon wear out as Trump's policies fail. They have to fail since they are based on two fundamental errors that have to do with physics, which is impervious to manipulation by politics. The first error is that climate change and ecosystem disruption are not important factors in the economy. The second is that mineral resources are still abundant and that the decline of the production of fossil fuels can be reversed. Because of these fundamental flaws, whatever Trump does will be a disaster, even assuming that he manages to avoid making some truly colossal strategic mistake in the international arena. Trump seriously risks to be remembered as the worst president in American history.

The decline and fall of Donald Trump could generate a long-lasting bad reputation for climate science denial. Unfortunately, there is little to be happy about that; the damage that Trump can manage to do to science and to the ecosystem even in just a few years of presidency will be very hard to reverse - if at all possible. And it is known how the public opinion is volatile and sensible to PR campaigns. A new scandal such as "Climategate" or a fortunate denial meme such as the "pause" could bring things back to the starting line. In any case, the climate change question is so polarized by now that the hardcore Trump supporters will never be convinced of the reality of climate change, not even when the their homes are swamped by the sea. 

But let's not be too pessimistic. At least for now, things are going in the right direction. And it could be worse! (even California's drought seems to be over)

Trump: the Defeat of Science

Minutes after Donald Trump took office as President, the page on climate change of the website of the White House disappeared. This may be just a result of some internal protocol, but also the first stage of a coming "purge" of climate science and climate scientists. In any case, the election of Trump is a major defeat for science and we need to understand what mistakes we made to arrive at this point. I am writing here something that probably won't make me popular with my scientist colleagues, but I thought I had to write it.

Defeats are supposed to teach people how to do better; in theory. In practice, it often happens that defeats teach people how to become masters in blame-shifting. With some exceptions, this seems to have been the main result of the recent defeat of the Democrats in the 2016 presidential election, where we saw a truly spasmodic search for culprits: Putin, the Russian hackers, the Fake News, the Rednecks, the FBI, Exxon, the aliens from Betelgeuse, and more. Everything except admitting one's mistakes.

Even less soul searching has been performed by those who turned out to be among the major losers in this story: science and scientists. In particular, climate scientists saw their field wiped out from the White House Website minutes after President Trump took office. That may have been simply a question of protocol, but surely it is not a good omen for the future.

So far, scientists have reacted with appropriate outrage to possibilities such as Trump repudiating the Paris climate treaty. However, on the average, scientists seem to be completely unable to even imagine that there may be something wrong with what they have been doing. We may have here a good illustration of the principle expressed by James Schlesinger that "people have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic". Even though some scientists are starting to show symptoms of panic, most of them seem to be still in complacency mode.

Yet, for everything that happens there is a reason and if you invaded Russia in winter it is no good to blame the snow for the defeat. So, what did scientists do that led them to a situation that may turn out to be even worse than the retreat from Moscow for Napoleon's Grande Armée?

One problem, here, is that if scientists had wanted to present themselves to the public as a priesthood of acolytes interested only in maintaining their petty privileges, they succeeded beyond the rosiest expectations. Yet, I don't think that this is the problem. Overall, science is still a sane profession and very few scientists have been directly involved in financial scandals. The public perceives this and normally rates scientists as much more trustworthy than - say- journalists or politicians. And modern climate science, as part of the field of Earth sciences, is nothing less than a triumph of human knowledge. Truly a major advance of what we know on the way our planet and our ecosystem work.

The problem, in my opinion, is a different one. It goes deeper and it is not related to individual scientists or to specific scientific fields. It has to do with science as a whole and, in particular, with the inconsistent messages that scientists are beaming to the public. According to the results reported by Ara Norenzayan's in "Big Gods" (Princeton, 2013), people have a built-in "lie detector" in their minds that works by a heuristic algorithm: people will evaluate the truth of what they are told on the basis of consistency. Not only the message must be consistent in itself, but also the messenger must be consistent with the message carried. This is a fundamental point: people don't normally care about data and factual evidence: they care about the consistency of the message in their social environment; it is something that Dan Kahan has shown in a series of studies on the public perception of climate science.

So, if your local prophet tells you that you must be chaste, he'd better be chaste himself. If he tells you that you must make sacrifices and accept poverty, he'd better be poor himself. And chastity/poverty must be acceptable in your social environment. These are things that Francis of Assisi understood already long ago. Then, think of Donald Trump: why was he elected? It was, mainly, because Trump's political message was consistent with Trump himself. Trump was telling people that he would make America rich and powerful and that was perfectly consistent with the fact that he is rich and powerful himself. Because of this, Trump's message didn't trigger people's lie detector and Trump the unthinkable became Trump the unavoidable.

Getting back to science, the message of climate change is intimately linked to the need of making sacrifices. We are asking people to reduce their consumption, reduce waste, travel less, and the like. It is a perfectly legitimate message and many religious groups have been carrying similar messages successfully. Of course, it would never work if Donald Trump were to propose it; but why can't scientists propose it successfully? Scientists are not Franciscan monks, but normally they are not rich. I often tell my PhD students that they are exchanging three years of starvation for a lifetime of unemployment. I don't really need to tell them that: they know that by themselves.

The problem is that there exists another side of science where scientists are beaming out exactly the opposite message of that of the need of making sacrifices. It is the side of the "gee-whiz science" or, maybe, "Santa Claus Science", scientific research still operating along the optimistic ideas developed in the 1950s, at the time of the "space age" and the "atomic age". The message that comes from this area is, "give us some money and we'll invent some magic device that will solve all the problema." It is a message that's ringing more and more hollow and the public is starting to perceive that the scientists are making promises they can't maintain. Not only the various scientific miracles that were promised are not materializing (say, nuclear fusion) but many pretended scientific revolutions are making things worse (say, shale oil). Still, many scientists keep making these promises and a certain section of society accepts - even requires - them.

So, the name of the problem is inconsistency. Scientists are taking two different and incompatible roles: that of doom-sayers and that of gift-givers. And "inconsistency" is just a polite way to say "lie." White scientist speak with forked tongue. Ye can't serve God and mammon.

The result is that not just Donald Trump despises science; it is a consistent fraction of the public that just doesn't believe the scientific message, especially about climate. The fraction of Americans who think that climate change is a serious threat has remained floating around 50% - 60%, going up and down, but not significantly changing. It is trench warfare in the climate communication war. Things may get worse for science under the Trump presidency. It already happened at the time of McCarthy, why shouldn't it happen again?

At this point, good manners dictate that when you write about a problem, you should also propose ways to solve it. Of course, there are ways that could be suggested: first of all, as scientists we should stop asking money for things that we know won't work (the "hydrogen-based economy" is a good example). Then, science badly needs a cleanup: we should crack down on predatory publishers, fight data fabrication, establish transparent standards for scientific publications, provide for free results of science to those who pay for it (the public), get rid of the huge number of irrelevant studies performed today, and more. Personally, I would also like a science that's more of a service for the community and less of a showcase for primadonnas in white coats.

But, as we all know, large organizations (and science is one) are almost impossible to reform from inside. So, where is science going? Difficult to say, but it may need a good shake-up from the outside (maybe from Trump, although he may well exaggerate) to be turned into something that may be what we truly need to help humankind in this difficult moment. The transformation will be surely resisted as much as possible, but change is needed and it will come.



"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else. he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." (Matthew 6:24)

There is only one culture: bringing back science into the fold of humanism

Yesterday, I was invited to give a talk at a public meeting on the usual themes: climate change, resources, pollution, and the like. This time, a question I received from the audience caused me a small enlightenment that I am describing here as I remember it (h/t Lorenzo Citti for having organized this interesting meeting) (image source)

Thanks for this question - it is a very interesting question: "are we teaching enough science to our children?" And I can tell you that it is much more than an interesting question, it caused some small earthquake in my mind. Truly, I had a flash of understanding that I had never had before and right now I completely changed my view of the world. It happens to me: the world changes so fast and I do my best to follow it.

Your question is so interesting because it has to do with the idea that there are two cultures: a scientific one and a literary one. As a consequence, some of us think that instruction is unbalanced in one or the other direction: maybe we teach too little science to our children, maybe too much. The whole idea goes back to someone named Snow who proposed it in the 1950s. He was not wrong, I think, but there were problems with the idea. The concept of the two cultures can be intended as meaning that we need somehow to bridge the gap that exists in between. Or, and I think that's what happens most often, it can be interpreted as meaning that one of the two cultures is superior to the other. That can generate a competition between the two and divide people into two different tribes: literates and scientists.  We are very good, as human beings, at dividing ourselves into separate tribes fighting each other. And that's bad, as you can imagine. Actually, it is a disaster. Snow was a scientist and he decried the scientific ignorance of literates. On this, he was right but in the long run the result was that literates despise scientists as illiterate boors and scientists despise literates as feebleminded ignorants.

Now, I had been thinking about all this and, as I said, today I had this flash that focused my mind on a concept. I think we have to say this clearly: this story of the "two cultures" is an idiocy. It must end. There is only ONE culture, and that's what we may call "humanism," if nothing else because we are all humans. That is, unless someone in the audience today is an alien or a droid. In such case, would you please stand up? No......? Apparently, we are all humans in this room and so we call our culture "humanism" (or, sometimes, "arts and humanities")  How else would you call it?

So, there is really no reason for considering modern science a separate culture rather than part of the human culture that we call humanism. I am saying this as a scientist: science is part of what I would like to call human "sapience", what the ancient called "sophos"; that we translate as "wisdom" "sapience," or "knowledge." The term philosopher just means someone who loves sapience. And that's what we are; scientists or non-scientists, the very fact that we are here today, engaged in this discussion. means that we love knowledge: we are all philosophers. And that's a good thing to be; sapience is what makes us human and that's why we speak of humanism.

So, why do science and scientists sometimes pretend to be a separate branch of knowledge? Well, it has to do with another concept that comes to us from the Greek philosophy. It goes under the name of techné that we may translate as "craftsmanship" and that originates the modern term "technology". Here lies the problem.

Five minutes ago, someone asked me about hydrogen powered cars. I answered that they have been a complete failure and that was it. But I ask you to go a little more in depth with this question. Why do many of us think these things are important: hydrogen cars, a hydrogen powered economy, and lots of strange things we hear as proposed by scientists and that are said to be able to "solve our problems." Why is that? There is a reason and it goes back to a period in history when scientists found that they were able to devise some clever gadgets: you remember the "atomic age", right? It started more or less from there. Then there was the space age, the information age, and so on. There was this great wave of optimism when we really thought that science would bring us a new age of happiness and prosperity - it was the triumph of technology over everything else. The triumph of techné over sophos.

That period of optimism is still with us: anything that you say that disputes the sacred cow of economic growth is answered with "the scientists will think of something." Climate change? Resource Depletion? Pollution? Not really problems if you have the right gadget to solve them. And this brings, sometimes, the question "do we teach enough science to our children?" It is a result of the opinion that, in order to solve our problems, we need more gadgets and that, in order to have more gadgets, we need more science and that, in order to have more science, we need to teach more of it to our children. I think this is not a good idea. I think we have too many gadgets, not too few. And all these gadgets either don't work or cause more problems than those they are supposed to solve. Think about that: we wanted flying cars and we got killer drones, we wanted freedom and we got body scanners, we wanted cheap energy and we got Fukushima, we wanted knowledge and we got 140 characters, we wanted a long life and we got Alzheimer. The more gadgets we have, the worse the situation becomes.

Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that technology is bad in itself. We all live in heated spaces, we use electricity, when we have a headache we take an aspirin, and we use a lot of useful devices in our everyday life. I am not telling you that we should run to the woods and live as our stone-age ancestors - not at all. Being good craftsmen is part of being human. It is just that this fascination with gadgetry is generating multiple disasters, as we have been discussing today: from climate change to all the rest. One of these disasters is the decline of science, with scientists often turned into those raucous boors who feel they have to send out a press release every month or so to describe how their new gadget will save the world.

It can't work in this way. We need to take control of the technology we use, we need to stop being controlled by it. And I think the first step for retaking control is to bring science back into the fold of humanism. I am saying this as a scientist and as someone who loves science - I have been loving science from when I was a kid. Modern science is a beautiful thing; well worth being loved. It has been telling us so much that's worth knowing: the history of our planet, the origin and the fate of the universe, the thermodynamic engines that make everything move, and much more. We need to see science as part of the human treasure of knowledge and we need to love knowledge in all its forms. And, as I said at the beginning, someone who loves knowledge is a philosopher and that's what we can all be and we should be; because it is our call as human beings. If we want to save the world, we don't need gadgetry, we need to be what we are: human beings.


See also this comment on my "Chimeras" blog

Frontiers's new blunder: firing editors who disagree with the company's editorial policy

The academic publisher Frontiers has summarily fired a group of editors because of their criticism of the editorial policy of the journals they were editing. Not bad for a company that claims to be a "community oriented"  publisher.

It is not the first time that "Frontiers" appears in the news for a blunder or another. Last year, I gave up with Frontiers on a row over their retraction of a perfectly good paper and, just two months ago, they made another big mistake with a paper dealing with HIV/AIDS. I am more and more convinced that I did the right thing. 

I guess that there is something basically wrong with the idea that a commercial publisher can handle academic papers in the "Open Access" format. For a profit oriented company, the obvious way to go is to maximize the number of papers published,but that is obviously in contrast with the goal of maximizing their quality. 

Open access publishing seemed to be a good idea, at the beginning. It is probably still a good idea, but the way it has been implemented is turning out to be a disaster. 

Here are some documents about Frontiers' latest blunder

From "Science Magazine" (emphasis added)

"Emotions are running high. The editors say Frontiers' publication practices are designed to maximize the company's profits, not the quality of papers, and that this could harm patients. Frederick Fenter, executive editor at Frontiers, says the company had no choice but to fire the entire group because they were holding up the publication of papers until their demands were met, which he likens to "extortion."


Read the whole article. 

Here is the abstract of the "Manifesto of Editorial Independence of Editors of Frontiers Medical Journals "

Much to our regret, repeated recent attempts of the medical Editors to discuss crucial issues regarding their position within Frontiers remained unanswered. Therefore Editors of the Frontiers Medical Journals felt urged to write the enclosed Manifesto of Editorial Independence.

The manifesto is submitted to Frontiers Media SA as the publisher and owner of the medical journals Frontiers in Medicine, Frontiers in Surgery, and Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine and signed by Editors from 14 countries.

The manifesto summarizes the Publisher’s continued interference with our editorial independence, documented transgressions, the unacceptable peer review procedures of medical article manuscripts, and the medical publishing regulations of the WAME, the ICMJE, and the COPE. The publisher is required to respond to the manifesto, to implement changes so that the international medical publishing standards are met, and full editorial independence established and warranted.

And, finally, the start of Frontiers' long rebuttal.

Frontiers today ended the engagement of several Specialty Chief Editors and the Field Chief Editors of Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine and Frontiers in Medicine. The Chief Editors wanted Frontiers to change its fundamental principle of distributed editorial decision-making during peer-review and the editors refused communication with Frontiers, some even blocking journal operations, until these demands were met.

A clash of epistemologies: why the debate on climate change is going nowhere.

(From Wikipedia) Epistemology (ἐπιστήμη, episteme-knowledge, understanding; λόγος, logos-study of) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge^[1][2] and is also referred to as "theory of knowledge". Put concisely, it is the study of knowledge and justified belief. It questions what knowledge is and how it can be acquired, and the extent to which knowledge pertinent to any given subject or entity can be acquired. (image source)

A few weeks ago, someone barreled into the comment section of a post on climate change on the blog of the Italian Society of Chemistry (SCI) with a series of attacks against climate science and climate scientists. The ensuing clash was all in Italian but, if you follow the debate on climate, you know very well how these things go. The newcomer monopolized the discussion by repeating the usual legends; climate has always been changed, there has been no temperature increase during the past 15 years, there is no proof of the human effect on climate, and so on. And you can imagine how the scientists following the blog reacted. The discussion rapidly degenerated into assorted insults and personal smears, until the moderator closed the comments. That was way too late: the climate science denier emerged as the winner; while the scientists managed to give the impression of being both narrow-minded and sectarian.

It was a classic case of climate trolling, but with one difference. This time, the troll didn't try to hide his identity (as trolls usually do); rather, he came with a name, an address, and a CV. He was Mr. Rinaldo Sorgenti, vice-president of the Italian Coal Industry Association ("Assocarboni"). Mr. Sorgenti's exploits on the SCI blog give us a chance to understand what generates the kind of behavior that we define as "trolling."

So, I am willing to bet that Mr. Sorgenti is NOT a paid disinformer - as he was accused to be in the debate. In other words, he doesn't deny climate science because he is on the payroll of Assocarboni (actually, he maintains that he gets no money for his position of vice-president, but I figure he gets at least a few perks from it). I would also say that not even the opposite holds true: Mr. Sorgenti is not the president of Assocarboni because he is a climate science denier. No, I would bet that denying climate science and being involved in the coal industry are two non-separate and non-separable elements of Mr. Sorgenti's worldview. And this worldview has little or nothing to do with what we call science. Mr. Sorgenti is not a scientist, he doesn't know how the scientific method works or, if he knows, he doesn't believe it works or it is useful for anything. He uses the methods of debate commonly used in the political debate; a method of discussion that we can define as "rhetoric."


Mr. Sorgenti's case is not isolated. Over several years of debate (if we may call it in this way), I came in contact with a number of people who can be defined as "trolls" or "deniers". Most of them (including Mr. Sorgenti) believe (genuinely, I think) that you can use the methods of the political debate to arrive to a conclusion on a complex and difficult scientific field such as climate science; and they resent being shortly dismissed by scientists. Scientists know how much work and study is needed to understand climate science and resent what they saw as superficiality and approximation in the debate. The result is the kind of clash we saw on the SCI blog. It was, if you like, a clash of epistemologies: rhetoric against the scientific method.

As in all clashes of absolutes, debaters think they are speaking the same language and they start from the same assumptions, but they are not. The problem is identified by Adam Dawson on "The Ruminator"in these terms:

..... you have to understand that in America there are two different types of science. There’s science that is profitable for corporations, which is good and righteous and rock solid. That’s the Smartphone, the water heater, the GPS, the 700 channels on the 62 inch flat screen, the boner pills, and so on and so on. And then there’s the science that costs corporations money, which is fraudulent, con-artist mumbo jumbo. Under that second definition are things like climatology, pollution measurements, oceanography, and other disciplines that might fuck up the profit margins of energy producers and manufacturers.

I think Dawson is right on target about the "two different types of science", but the point is not so much that some types science cost corporations money. Science and technology push for change and change often means that someone will lose money, but that doesn't mean that change is impossible. The Internet, for instance, is bankrupting newspapers, but the newspaper lobby doesn't appear to be very effective in stopping the Internet from expanding. Rather, the fundamental point is that scientific fields such as climate science use different methods for gathering data and managing knowledge than, say, the science of solid state devices. It is an epistemological difference: the kind of certainty that can be derived from a well designed laboratory experiment performed on a solid state device is not possible in climate science.

The different epistemological approach becomes really fundamental when it is question to implement a policy based on the result of the models. Climate scientists mostly agree that there is no simple technological remedy to avoid disastrous climate change. Then, what we are proposing is not hard engineering, but some kind of social engineering based on a general consensus that the danger of climate change is real. Now, how do we obtain such a consensus? To start, we need to share the basic assumptions on how the conclusions of climate science are obtained and validated; this is a question of epistemology. And when we deal with social matters, the traditionally accepted methods of attaining knowledge (and consensus) are not based on the scientific method. The debate becomes political, and the methods used for political debates are completely different. As I said, it is a clash of epistemologies.


In many ways, we seem to be learning to use different epistemological methods in the climate debate: have you noticed the claim that there exists a "97% consensus" among scientists on the climate problem? It has had a remarkable impact; considering how rabidly it has been criticized on the deniers' side. But can you think of a single case in the history of science when a scientific controversy has been subjected to a majority vote? Never that I know. In science, we believe that the scientific method is sufficient to arrive at a consensus. Political controversies are a different thing; data and interpretations are much more uncertain; hence the need for a vote. 

I am not saying that science should turn into a political organization. It is already something, however, that we recognize what we are dealing with: it is a political debate, not a scientific one. And we need to recognize that to stiffen up and look offended when someone belittles climate science is not useful. Even worse is to state that someone is a paid disinformer because he is not using the scientific method. We need to be way smarter than that if we want to go somewhere in fighting climate change.

UFO: a knowledge problem

For those of us who have lived the whole cycle of the UFO phenomenon, I highly recommend "The UFO phenomenon" a book by John Greer, "The Archdruid". The book is also summarized in a post of his.

Greer is a lucid thinker, an excellent analyst, and his knowledge is truly encyclopedic. The result is a book that, as it could have been expected (and as he himself describes) "managed the not inconsiderable feat of offending both sides of the UFO controversy. It did so by the simple expedient of setting aside the folk mythology that’s been heaped up with equal enthusiasm by true believers in extraterrestrial visitation and true believers in today’s fashionable pseudoskeptical debunkery."

It is not often that a book can change one's worldview, but this one did that for me on several points. Greer is completely right in noting that the UFO phenomenon - as others - have given rise to a wave of "pseudoskeptical debunkery." The concept is that often scientifically minded people have gone too far in their criticism of anything that appears to be outside what we consider the realms of science.

One of the problems considered by Greer is disinformation, that is the willful distortion and misrepresentation of the data. It is something that plays an important role every time we move away from phenomena which can be comfortably reproduced in a laboratory. But scientists have usually no training and no experience in recognizing disinformation and dealing with it. They just tend to ignore it, and are easy victims of its effects. On this point, the discussion in Greer's book is excellent and brings overwhelming support to his conclusion that the UFO phenomenon is mainly the result of disinformation created by the US military.

Another point raised by Greer is how the debate on UFOs has been framed using different views on how to obtain knowledge (if you like, it is an epistemological problem). Believers in the extraterrestrial origins of UFO have been using rhetorical methods, debunkers have been using the scientific method. Greer correctly notes that there is an abyss of difference in the two methods. Science tries to verify a theory by falsifying it and just one experiment that goes against the theory will destroy it. Rhetoric attempts to buttress a theory by piling up positive results and neglecting negative ones. When we get to debating UFOs, debunkers are at a definite disadvantage as they have to prove that all sightings are illusions, or hoaxes, or known flying objects. It can't work.

So, if someone says that he has seen strange lights in the sky, it is silly to feel that a scientist's duty is to automatically dismiss that by saying that it was just the planet Venus or something like that. That doesn't mean that we have to cede to the tsunami of pseudoscience diffusing all over the infosphere, but science will lose credibility if it continues operating in the "automatic debunking mode". (See, for instance, this post by Paula). And if science loses credibility, it will become more and more difficult to demolish even clearly flawed claims, for  instance about low temperature nuclear fusion.

The epistemological problems that Greer raises is profound and important. Suppose that there existed alien intelligences, and that it were possible to contact them, would the scientific method be suitable to study them? Hardly so, at least beyond a trivial level. Even studying the behavior of our own species - which we know to exist - turns out to be extremely difficult and easily affected by disinformation campaigns, as it has happened to "The Limits to Growth" study in 1972 and is happening now for climate science.

Modern science was born to study the motion of planets and to solve all kinds of mechanical problems. But, in time, we have been discovering how complex the universe is. Think just about this: we have good models telling us how human activity is changing the climate. But we have no good models telling us how to convince humankind that it is crucial to stop doing the things that create climate change. Clearly, we are missing something and something very important, which the scientific method can hardly deal with. The story of the UFO phenomenon is a reminder that we need - as always - to go beyond the old paradigms.



A previous post of mine on the UFO phenomenon.

h/t Corvide

The decline of science: why scientists are publishing too many papers

We are seeing scientists badly failing in convincing decision makers of the urgent need of doing something against the impending disaster caused by global warming. But that's just a symptom of the decline of scientific research, desperately seeking for funds, but oppressed by bureaucracy and by a general disinterest on the part of the public; to say nothing of the rampant phenomenon of pseudoscience. In this text, I argue that one of the causes of the decline of science is the emphasis in publishing (the "publish or perish" rule). I argue that scientific papers have become a form of currency, suffering all the problems which plague the modern financial markets. Both the financial world and the scientific world have developed "emergent" properties which optimize throughput but not necessarily benefits. In short, we are publishing too much. (image above from this page)

The scientific world seems to be swamped by a true tsunami of papers of all kinds, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. A situation which looks more and more similar to that of the general cacophony of the World Wide Web, swamped by poor quality information drowning the good information (if any). This starts to be a serious problem and some have explicitly asked that scientists should publish a smaller number of papers, but of higher quality (as argued, for instance, by Timo Hannay). 

But why do we find ourselves in this situation? What has caused science to become a paper mill? Here, I argue that it is the result of the basic properties of complex systems. These systems generate emergent properties which are often similar in fields which appear very different at first sight. In particular, scientific publishing turns out to be very similar to the world's financial system, with all the associated problems of uncontrolled growth and waste of resources. Let me explain my point.

From the beginning of one's career, scientists are pressured to publish, publish, and publish. That is known as the "Publish or Perish" rule which is implemented by means of the "peer review" process in which colleagues of the authors have the authority of accepting or rejecting the submitted paper, or request modifications. It looks simple, but it is much more complex than this, with several variants on the theme of "peer review", different prestige of scientific journals, different methods of diffusion (e.g. open access or paid subscriptions) and more.

One of the problems with the system is that the peer review system can usually filter out the really bad papers, but can hardly do the same for papers which are simply mediocre. The limitations of peer review have generated the arcane (and ineffectual) methods of post-publication evaluation which sometimes go under the name of "scientometry" or "scientometrics" (not to be confused with Scientology!!).

For a non-scientist, the urge to publish and the methods of publications in science are hard to understand, but the matter will appear perfectly clear if we compare it to something we are all familiar with: ordinary, monetary currency. Let me examine the many parallels in a non-exhaustive list.

1. Currency. The way we intend monetary currency nowadays is something that has no intrinsic value: it is in the form of sheets of paper or bits in computers. But by having these bits or pieces of paper you gain prestige and luxury items, and you climb up in the social ladder. The situation is exactly the same for scientific papers. In themselves, papers may have little or no value, but the more papers a scientist has published, the higher is his/her prestige and the more he/she can climb up the scientific ladder to higher and more prestigious positions. Papers can also bring luxury items in the form of expensive research equipment (microscopes, particle accelerators, scanners, etc.).

1. Emitting currency. Today, central banks are the entities authorized to emit monetary currency, and they have the authority of stamping a validation mark on an otherwise worthless piece of paper which then becomes 'money'. In science, validation of a paper is the privilege of scientific publishers. But who gave to scientific publishers this authority? It is an interesting question, just as impossible to answer as asking who gave the banks the same kind of authority with ordinary currency.

2. Spending your currency. Ordinary currency has no value in itself, but it can be exchanged with all sorts of items in the market. Scientific papers are not so easy to redeem, but can be transformed into ordinary currency by using them as tokens necessary to obtain a salary, career advancements, honorariums, and more.

3. Inflation. Currency is well known to undergo inflation; it loses part of its value with time. Scientific papers are subjected to the same phenomenon. Older papers are less valuable than new ones and in order to maintain your "wealth", as a scientist you must fight inflation. If your papers get old and no new ones are published, then they will be worth nothing.

4. Interest on currency. Ordinary currency can be deposited in banks in order to acquire an interest in the form of more currency. For scientific papers, the same role is played by funding agencies which transform scientific papers into research grants, which scientists will use to produce more papers. It is a classic example of a reinforcing feedback. 

5. Assaying. The real value of ordinary currency can be ascertained by procedures which may involve chemical assaying of precious metals. With paper currency, there are ways to determine whether they have been printed by authorized agencies. With scientific papers, their validity is verified by "referees;" scientists who will decide whether the data and the interpretation reported are correct.

 6. Counterfeiting. Ordinary currency can be counterfeited in various ways, for instance in the form of worthless metals instead of precious ones, in the form of paper bills printed by unauthorized agencies, and in the form of legitimate - but worthless - currency emitted by the central bank of small and unknown countries. In scientific publishing, counterfeiting is performed by small "predatory" publishers which do not perform the same validity check as the established publishers and may simply publish anything in exchange for a (standard monetary) fee paid by the authors.

7. Bad money replaces the good. This is a well known phenomenon in all economies, with money being debased by reducing the content of precious metals or printing too much of it. In science, we are seeing the same phenomenon with the proliferation of scientific publishers - often shady businesses trying to make a buck from scientists eager to see their paper published but not succeeding with the traditional journals. The result is an inflation of bad papers which tend to swamp the flux of good ones.

8. Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing.  A Ponzi scheme is a pyramidal structure in which the lower layers pay the higher ones for the privilege of being inside. A multi-level marketing scheme is similar, but you pay for the privilege of being able to sell a product. There is no reason why such schemes cannot exist also in science. Some recently started journals have taken up a pyramidal structure which looks suspiciously like a multi-layer marketing scheme. In this case, scientists are drawn into the scheme with the allure of being defined as "editors." As a result, they work for free for the publisher!



As you see, the similarities are so many and so evident that we can say that the paper publishing system in modern science is a form of currency which exists and prospers within the system which has created it. It is so entrenched and so natural that most scientists seem to show little or no interest in its origins. Yet, the peer review system seems to have been unknown a century ago (see, e.g. this note by Michael Nielsen). For instance, only one of the about 300 papers published by Albert Einsten went through peer review. The scientific publication system we know today seems to have become the rule only in the second half of the 20th century. It is impressive that this system emerged all by itself without anyone planning it. It is an "emergent phenomenon", one of the characteristics of complex systems which tend to evolve in such a way to maximize the dissipation of potential energy (see, e.g. Kaila and Annila).

We could say that the world's financial system has evolved in order to maximize the destruction of the Earth's natural resources; favoring their consumption at speeds much larger than the Earth's capability to reform them - obviously not a benefit for humankind. We could argue that the world's scientific publication system has evolved in order to maximize the production of a large number of mediocre and useless paper. Again, this is not a benefit to science. Scientists are publishing too much!

Can these systems be changed? There is much talk on the subject of reforming the world's financial system, just as there is much talk about reforming the world's scientific publication system. In both cases, however, reform seems to be very difficult, if not impossible. In science, the well intentioned effort to open up to the public the results of scientific research by the "Open Access" system seems to have backfired, generating a wave of "predatory publishers" favoring an even faster dissipation of scientific potentials by greatly increasing the number of mediocre or bad papers. The financial system seems to be even more impervious to all kind of changes.

In the end, it seems that most systems of this kind can be reformed only by rebuilding them after they have crashed. That's not surprising: after all, you should know that if you fight thermodynamics, thermodynamics always wins.