But "common sense" can often be wrong! Anyone studying physics can tell you that immediately! When you are in a car and accelerating forward, where do you think a balloon filled with helium will feel a push? Go on, use your "common sense" and answer that.
In all of this diatribe against publishing, NO ONE has offered an ALTERNATIVE means of how such discoveries and new ideas should be disseminated. Zilch! Where do we find the written details of what was done, how it was done, and how the conclusion was arrived in intricate clarity so that someone else can try to verify if it is valid? No one has offered any alternative. So if we go by all these complaints and people STOP publishing, you will STILL be in the dark ages without all the conveniences that you have obviously taken for granted!
And since we are using personal observation here has "evidence" that gives us free passes to make generalized statement about something we barely know anything about, I should be able to do that too. From MY personal experience, most physicists first goal in publishing is to report their work. PERIOD. Is there a personal agenda to get recognized? OF COURSE! Who wouldn't want such a thing? However, most of us got into this field first and foremost because we love what we do and can't think of anything else that we want to do! It is also imperative that what we believe to be important should be published, because that is a shared knowledge. It is a responsibility, unlike working in industries where such discoveries can often be held as industrial secrets and proprietary knowledge! When you publish something, you are telling the world what you did, and how you did it, with no secrets left, so that someone else can replicate it! That is NOT a sign of a selfish act!
And THAT is MY personal view. I have more than 80 publications to my credit, so I'm not just talking about this based on some superficial observation.
I still want to know how you expect to use your modern electronics if people who worked on it didn't publish their work in the first place!
Zz.