Authorities in Science: High Reputation Journals and Books

[hutchphd]

Perhaps Richard Phillips Feynman said it all:

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”​

 

[russ_watters]

Good peer review is supposed to weed out stuff that is not technically correct. But it doesn't always work out that way.

They weed out stuff that contains flaws they can detect, but don't interpret that to mean the other side of the coin, that anything published is claimed by the journal to be correct. That would be inherently impossible, and undesirable.

I didn't claim that journals make claims to be authoritative. But readers of good journals take them to be authoritative to some extent. For example, PhysicsForums has a rule saying

If that's the type of example driving your perception, it's a misunderstanding/over-reading. PF requires journal publication as a minimum standard for quality. This is not meant to imply that anything published in a journal is automatically assumed to be correct.

It seems you are creating a binary interpretation, but it doesn't have to be - and in this case isn't - the case. Just because rejected papers are often judged to be flawed, doesn't mean accepted papers are judged correct. A journal does not have and doesn't claim and peers don't believe they have such authority.

Edit: Consider the erroneous OPERA results. In that case, the results were believed to be in error, but the researchers could not find the error, so they published anyway, and with an invitation to help find the error (which was then found). It's a stark example, but the point is that much error checking is expected to happen after publication. Scientists absolutely know that new results are claimed only to be tentatively correct.

 

[A. Neumaier]

There are clearly a lot of other interpretations that are commonly held within the scientific community, so that doesn't seem like much of an example of always-right-by-decree authority.

What about the incidents recently discussed in Peter Woit's blog?

What I looked into is one specific story, trying to figure out what was behind Sean Carroll’s claim in the New York Times that

For years, the leading journal in physics had an explicit policy that papers on the foundations of quantum mechanics were to be rejected out of hand.​

Mark Hillery here notes that this is likely a reference to the Physical Review, and that it very much has not been true for the past 15 years, during which he has been an editor there.

 

[Dale]

What about the incidents recently discussed in Peter Woit's blog?

To me it seemed simply like an editorial decision that interpretations papers were out of scope for that specific journal. Personally I would take that statement as evidence that the editors of the journal share my opinion that interpretations are not science and they wanted to publish science rather than philosophy.

Is your concern really only about always-right-by-decree authority in the context of interpretations?

 

[Dale]

Edit: Consider the erroneous OPERA results. In that case, the results were believed to be in error, but the researchers could not find the error, so they published anyway, and with an invitation to help find the error (which was then found). It's a stark example, but the point is that much error checking is expected to happen after publication. Scientists absolutely know that new results are claimed only to be tentatively correct.

A good example. If any group could reasonably claim authority status it would be the OPERA team.

 

[A. Neumaier]

Is your concern really only about always-right-by-decree authority in the context of interpretations?

That was indeed the context in which ftr posted his original query (if you follow the links in post #1 a few steps backward).

But I don't really have a concern, I can live easily with the way science is done in our culture.

 

[Dale]

That was indeed the context in which ftr posted his original query (if you follow the links in post #1 a few steps backward).

Then I will move this back to the QM forum and disengage at this point. I have no interest in interpretations and less than no interest in the politics of interpretations.

 

[vanhees71]

Isn't this always the case when new insights meet tradition, aka Lehrmeinung? It simply takes some time until new findings get part of the curriculum. Defending old points of view is part of the tests that new theories have to pass. It is less the authority which counts, although in case of Copenhagen the scientists involved certainly have been authorities, but rather the human tendency to remain at the status quo. I just thought yesterday that the problem with a GUT is not the theory, it is the fact that the existing ones work so well.

This case is somewhat a puzzle for me, and it gets ever more enigmatic, the more I try to read Bohr's and Heisenberg's writings. They are pretty "philosophical" and that seems to be the whole trouble of the interpretation business until today. Why have Bohr and Heisenberg such an "authority on interpretation"? For me it's much easier to read Schrödinger (though he did not come with an own interpretation, mostly following Copenhagen but with a wellknown reservation and opposition against it), Dirac, and particularly Pauli. All were Copenhagenianers but just used the math of Born's rule and (another complete enigma for me) the collapse postulate.

Another case is Einstein, who, against the urban legend, understood QT in the CI best of all the mentioned founding fathers of QT, was a proponent of the incompleteness conjecture of QT in the sense of a local realistic HV theory as an underlying theory leading to QT as classical mechanics leads to statistical mechanics. Unfortunately, we don't know, how he'd have reacted, had he known Bell's analysis of the local realistic HV idea and the experimental falsification with confirmation of QT.

 

[julcab12]

Science doesn't care any of it anyways. I just love reading scientific ideas mostly theoretical if it has any scientific validation, countless experimentation etc the better. The Author comes next. I only checked authors as reference and out of curiousity. You can validate through his work, not the person. Well his work holds more value anyways. Unless your the fanatic type. Reputation is more about indicators or guide.

 

[DarMM]

To me it seemed simply like an editorial decision that interpretations papers were out of scope for that specific journal. Personally I would take that statement as evidence that the editors of the journal share my opinion that interpretations are not science and they wanted to publish science rather than philosophy.

Is your concern really only about always-right-by-decree authority in the context of interpretations?

Foundations of QM is more broad than interpretations. I think it more reflects the poor quality of foundations papers at the time which were purely discursive without the technical and mathematical results you see today.

 

[julcab12]

I remember this thread: Among selected interpretation which one holds more merit now?

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/find-your-ideal-quantum-interpretation.966905/

 

[andrew s 1905]

It seems to me science is a social construct and like othe social constructs has it's rituals and priests. However, what sets it apart is/was that the final authority was nature itself with the requirement for theory to predict repeatable experimental outcomes.

In areas of science where this is difficult due to only small groups having access to the necessary equipment or to restricting access to the data or where the theory fails to make testable predictions then this distinction become, in my opinion, blurred and open to fashion and other maladies that infect other social constructs.

Regards Andrew

 

[Heikki Tuuri]

It is a serious warning sign if someone in scientific discussion says the word "authority" or "consensus".
https://hsm.stackexchange.com/quest...ly-say-if-i-were-wrong-it-would-only-take-one

The book 100 Authors against Einstein was a cardinal example. There were only about 30 authors in the book. Even the title was wrong.

From recent years, I recall 32 researchers of the inflation hypothesis condemning the opinions of Paul Steinhardt. In climate studies, there are lists of thousands of people agreeing on some hypothesis, which seems to have about 1 sigma certainty at the first glance.

One has to read and understand publications to know who is an authority, that is, does few errors. For the layman, reading the papers is not possible. He has to trust famous people or whoever he thinks is reliable and knowledgeable.

 

[Minnesota Joe]

I've always thought of an "authority" as someone with special knowledge on some subject, but I like throwing reliability in as well. There are people with special knowledge about physics, about politics, about philosophy, plumbing, and so on. Not all of them reliable or reliable about communicating their knowledge. (Also, there probably aren't authorities about the behavior of Big Foots, but there probably are authorities on what people say about Big Foots.)

I've been influenced by an essay by Bertrand Russel, "On the Value of Scepticism (1928)",

There are matters about which those who have investigated them are agreed; the dates of eclipses may serve as an illustration. There are other matters about which experts are not agreed. Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. Einstein's view as to the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been rejected by all experts not many years ago, yet it proved to be right. Nevertheless the opinion of experts, when it is unanimous, must be accepted by non-experts as more likely to be right than the opposite opinion. The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

(Emphasis mine).