When the seventeenth-century astronomer Edmund Halley was trying to puzzle out the properties of cometary orbits, he asked his revered but reclusive colleague Isaac Newton what would be the general shape of the orbit of a body orbiting the Sun if, as many scientists of the day were beginning to suspect, there were an attractive force between the Sun and the body, diminishing in strength with the inverse of the distance squared. "An ellipse," was Newton's instant reply. Halley, who had exhausted many hours trying to solve the problem, asked him how he could say this so casually. "Why, I have calculated it," said Newton.
It turned out that Newton, some years before, had formulated the law of gravity for which he is now celebrated and had used it to calculate the orbits of planets and comets. But he had neglected to publish either his theory or any of the practical results derived from it. With the problem of the planetary orbits solved to his satisfaction, he apparently felt no urge to let anyone else know that they could put away their pens and paper. But at Halley's urging he rooted out his old calculations and put together the Principia Mathematica, a three-volume compendium of mathematical deduction and the cornerstone of modern theoretical physics.
Newton's reticence is most certainly a thing of the past. Modern science, with money, fame, and professorial chairs at stake, has as competitive a career structure as Wall Street or Washington. Reputations, and the material rewards that go with them, depend on proven output (in the form of scientific papers published in prestigious journals) and on getting ideas into print a week ahead of one's rivals. Whether the publications are memorable or the ideas correct is of less immediate consequence, because decisions on academic tenure are made in the here and now, whereas scientific truth often takes decades to be filtered from the stream of effervescent and mostly evanescent scientific creativity.
Now add to this the commercial pressure of the marketplace. Newton, we may suppose, was such a scholar and an introvert that he cared for little beyond finding the solution to a problem. James Watson and Francis Crick were assuredly conscious of the prestige and Noble Prizes that would come their way by winning the race to find the structure of DNA, the chemical basis of heredity and genetics, but they did not envisage commercial gain from their discovery.
But what about the scramble to invent new high temperature superconductors that filled the newspaper pages two years ago? When Paul Chu and his colleagues announced, in March 1987, that they had made a ceramic material that conducted electricity with absolutely no resistance at the temperature of liquid nitrogen, they set off a flurry of hasty research, all-night experimental sessions, and hurried publications, which brought with it announcements of super conductors which worked at 160 degrees above absolute zero, or at -400 Fahrenheit (F), or at room temperature…All of these wild claims have died: The highest temperature at which superconductivity is known to occur remains about 120 degrees above absolute zero, -350 degrees F. Was this string of erroneous "discoveries" due to understandable enthusiasm, or was it just bad science? And was the haste due to material greed or the more ethereal desire for fame and scientific immortality?
And what about "cold fusion?" When Stanely Pons and Martin Fleischmann
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