The discussion centers on the concept of authority in scientific discourse, emphasizing that while highly respected journals and books serve as authorities, they are ultimately dependent on peer review and citation counts. Participants argue that reputation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for authority, as scientists often rely on established texts and journals to validate claims they cannot independently verify. The conversation highlights the distinction between authority and reputation, particularly in STEM fields, where the former is less applicable than the latter.
PREREQUISITESResearchers, academic publishers, and students in the sciences seeking to understand the dynamics of authority and reputation in scientific literature and its impact on knowledge dissemination.
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.A. Neumaier said:Good peer review is supposed to weed out stuff that is not technically correct. But it doesn't always work out that way.
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.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
What about the incidents recently discussed in Peter Woit's blog?Dale said: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.
Peter Woit said: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.
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.A. Neumaier said:What about the incidents recently discussed in Peter Woit's blog?
A good example. If any group could reasonably claim authority status it would be the OPERA team.russ_watters said: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.
That was indeed the context in which ftr posted his original query (if you follow the links in post #1 a few steps backward).Dale said:Is your concern really only about always-right-by-decree authority in the context of interpretations?
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.A. Neumaier said:That was indeed the context in which ftr posted his original query (if you follow the links in post #1 a few steps backward).
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.A. Neumaier said: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.
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.Dale said: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?
(Emphasis mine).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.