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Commentary

Opening the Closed Community

Human nature drives society to war with itself, with our tendency to concentrate power into a social hierarchy battling our desire for individual freedom. Over the past month we have seen two powerful examples of this battle in the fall of Dan Rather and in the success of Dick Rutan.

Dan Rather presented documents on CBS's 60 Minutes that purported to show that President Bush received favoritism in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam war. Within 24 hours of the broadcast of the program, bloggers showed the documents to be forgeries, having been written with Microsoft Word rather than with a 1970s era typewriter. Over the following week the bloggers showed that the documents were produce by, and most likely written by, a Democratic partisan. Dan Rather could not admit that the documents were forgeries for another week. This episode demonstrates that large institutions can become slow, unthinking, and doctrinaire, and that independent voices can quickly uncover the errors of the larger institutions.

Pastel image of Madeline the Cat and SpaceShipOne.

The White Knight aircraft takes off, carrying under its belly SpaceShipOne.

Dick Rutan, with the financial support of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, demonstrated again that a small group led by a visionary and talented man can create technological breakthroughs that elude larger entities. Paul Allen himself, along with Bill Gates, accomplished this feat in the computer industry. Now Dick Rutan has accomplished this feat in rocketry by being the first private company to place a man into space on a reusable rocket plane. On October 4, 2004, pilot Brian Binnie in the Rutan-designed SpaceShipOne was dropped at 46000 feet by the specially-designed White Knight aircraft. Firing the rocket engine, Binnie flew SpaceShipOne at mach 3 in a suborbital flight to an altitude of 62 miles. This was the second flight of SpaceShipOne into space in 5 days; the first flight was accomplished by pilot Michael Melvill. By reaching space twice within 14 days, Rutan's group won the X Prize competition.

These two events presage coming changes in the dissemination of astronomical information and technological expertise, because some of the institutional problems that plague the giant news media and NASA also plague the astronomical community. As in the case of CBS news, the scientific community controls what type of research is conducted and published. As in the case of NASA, the government controls the funding of astronomical research. While there are good reasons for this structure in the astronomical community, it does lead to a parochialism in the scientific community that slows scientific advancement.

Most scientific journals resemble expensive vanity presses: the author pays to have his article published, usually a cost that is covered by a research grant. To ensure a high standard within the most prominent journals, the editor of a journal sends a submitted article to one or two scientists for comments. This referee process keeps out the shoddy science and the pseudo-science, whether it be the theoretical paper that forgets a key piece of physics, the observational paper that misuses statistics, or the crank paper about Earth's immanent collision with Planet X. While this is to the good, the referee process has a cost, because on occasion it keeps from publication articles that strikes a referee the wrong way, especially if an article's main points contradict a referee's world view. Like CBS, the referee is the arbiter for the scientific society of what news and ideas are acceptable; he is a censor for the community.

Government determines what science is done by awarding grants to researchers. Effectively a university professor, his students, and his post-docs are small businesses that contract work with the government. The awarding of a grand is generally done through peer review, with many teams submitting proposals, and a small committee of scientists from within the community deciding which proposals to fund and at what level. It is common for only a third to a fifth of proposals to receive funding, and often the funding is significantly less than what was asked. A researcher at a university must be certain that his ideas appeal to his colleagues that are on a peer review. This helps guard against spending government money on poor scientific research, but it also discourages independent and risky research, and it reinforces parochial thinking within the scientific community.

The doling of scarce instrument and supercomputer resources, which is also done to some extent through peer review, acts in the same as the peer review of funding. But with many scientific instruments requiring government funding, additional forces that close the scientific community are applied. The most expensive astronomical projects are satellites such as the Hubble Space Telescope; the price tag for one of these projects is several billion dollars. Even for a moderately-priced mission, the price tag is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But to look deep into the sky, to look at the x-rays and gamma-rays produced by black holes and neutron stars, to look into the star-forming regions of the galaxy, you must go above and stay above the atmosphere, so progress in some areas of astronomy occurs only through massive government spending. The decision of which kinds of space observatory to build is highly political, with prominent astrophysicist in the community dominating the decision making process. Sometimes the decision making is above board, with a panel of scientists making recommendations to an agency administrator. Other times, the decision making is through hidden dealings, such as when a Maryland senator slipped some legislation into a bill that directed NASA to place a NASA instrument onto a Japanese scientific satellite, which benefited the builder of the instrument. A part of the community therefore decides which instruments to build and which types of science to conduct within the community.

The scientific community therefore has some of the features of the giant media companies, controlling which research is published, and some of the features of government, controlling the direction of research through the spending of money.

How will new technology change this dynamic? The Internet now allows educated people outside of the scientific community to discuss scientific theory and observation with a world-wide audiences at a minimal cost. Many of these educated people will be Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics who were unable to find employment because of the overproduction of pure-research scientists by the universities. Digital cameras have become very sophisticated and inexpensive. Computational power and storage is cheap. These all suggest that many observational and theoretical projects are now open to outside investigation. While some in the scientific community may resist this opening of science, other clearly would welcome it, as the projects that make use of amateur telescopes show. And as in the case of big media and NASA, new blood and new ideas should improve scientific research.

In the early years of the republic, amateur scientists such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin made significant contributions to science through the informal contacts they maintained with the broader scientific community. I hope this part of our past will again be a part of our future.

Freddie Wilkinson

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