(2003-07-01) Scientific Culture

Leonard Cassuto on differences between scientific and humanities (Liberal Arts) cultures. That collegiality extends to physicists' dealings with their own. One physicist told me: "The process of doing Physics involves a lot of communication. It's highly interactive and collaborative. Even theorists don't write on their own." Indeed, all of the physicists working in a given subfield usually know each other... Getting funds, on the other hand, is a Zero-Sum game. Money is the lifeline of the research scientist, and there's only a certain amount of it available in a given area. The answer seems to be that physicists (and others in the hard sciences) have a strong faith in the Peer Review system. More important, they trust in the evaluative process that underlies it. Physicists told me that peer review in the sciences has an ethical code built into it. There can be personality conflicts, of course, but the scientists share the belief that the peer-review system can deliver trustworthy assessments of their work. That enables them to relax and treat each other with respect. The peer-review system in the humanities and social sciences inspires no such confidence.