If you think otherwise, you’ve been reading too many scientists.
Science from scientists : great.
History from scientists : avoid.
They are not just weak on a sense of history, they are actively & avidly
anti-history.
Ever notice that you search in vain throughout any scientific article for exactly when an experiment took place, or where ?
Humans crave the W5 of life : but scientists, fully trained scientists, are not human : they are now all a latter day Piere-Simon Laplace, seer and knower of everything in the universe.
Petty time and space are meaningless in their eternal now.
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| 99% of our fundamental scientific beliefs were NEVER peer-reviewed ! |
Anyway, back to peer-review.
It basically didn’t begin to exist until late in the 1950s.
Examples follow, from science journals that even lay readers have heard of.
SCIENCE and JAMA : after 1940. LANCET : after 1976.
Before that, the sole editor of each journal reviewed potential articles and consulted with a few of the ”elderly guard” of the science discipline involved.
Lucky then that any new ground breaking articles ever got published at all.
But they did, sort of : you “Journal-Shopped” just like the way expensive lawyers shop for judges.
You could always get published somewhere, if your article and yourself were even just half way credible.
There were, back then, a lot of journals about.
But, and it is a very very big but.
Only a very few general science journals (NATURE and SCIENCE and the French and German equivalents) were in the libraries of all of the world’s very few research-oriented universities and institutes.
At only a slightly lower level, the leading journals in each scientific discipline could be reliably found in every university and institute in the world that did research in that field. LANCET is good example.
But below that, the subscribers to a particular journal could be small indeed in both numbers and in terms of geography.
Some journals only came out a few times a year and had small lists of subscribers in maybe only one or two countries because while the articles could be very long and very lightly edited indeed, they had to hue to the editor-publisher’s particular scientific hobby horse.
Others were like the bible in their sub-field : but only specialists in that small area would read them : you had no way to reach the general scientific reader in even the next sub-discipline over.
The best research often involves a team of people from a couple of closely related fields all coming at it from slightly different fields. At other times, a casual reader in NATURE or SCIENCE reads an article in an area far from their own and suddenly see an application for that discovery in their field.
These all-powerful science journal editors back then had a foot in Published science and also in Popular science.
Published science is merely the sum total of all articles ever published in the world’s science journals, regardless of size.
Popular science is where the real power of old school journal editors came to fore. It had a very strong promoting ability and a very strong censoring ability.
These editors could instantly publish an article, let it run at almost any length, and place it at the front of the journal.
They could then follow this up with an journal editorial comment and alert the few all-powerful science reporters in the world’s biggest papers, confident that those reporters’ copy would be repeated by the wire services down to even small town weeklies.
Or they could pretend to be willing to take an article they didn’t really like, as long as it made a few, and few more and a few more amendments or further research : “talking it out” like a politician in parliament does to kill a bill quietly when a session ends.
The dispirited researcher would finally decide to give up on getting their paradigm-shaking new research into any widely read journal and decide to have it published in a much smaller journal, just to be done with it - and then maybe decide not to do any more research in that area.
Because if the article rankled the old guy in the editor’s chair it probably also rankled the researcher’s university department head, the head of the tenure committee, their discipline’s Society’s annual convention’s abstracts selection committee, the head of the grant committee on this or that foundation or government grant agency.
Often these elders all knew each other very well, and while they didn’t agree on everything - on this issue they did agree : it just had to be wrong because it struck at the very foundations of a lifetime of work..... that had propelled them to the top of their field.
My thesis for my book on Martin Henry Dawson’s career in science is that all scientists were gratified by the ever increasing amount of scientific research that was being done from the 1870s onwards.
But sometimes, a few results thrown up by the vast ocean of twentieth century published science severely/completely grated against the certitudes the elders of science had taken as dogma in their nineteenth century scientific youth.
Or, in other words, sometimes specific articles from the generally gratifying results of modernization science (many more published science articles) so rankled the world’s collective scientific elites that Modernity Science (aka Popular Science) was thrown up to rebut or suppress it.
These annoying articles were far from being wrong ; rather they were far too right and were confirmed so, decades later, in our own era, that of Post-Modernity.
Post-Modernity only began in 1945 after the Atomic Bomb and Auschwitz first cast doubts on the 500 year old Enlightenment Project and it really began taking off after 1965.
But its scientific roots (for I argue at the base Post-Modernity is a fundamental change in all of our personal scientific perspectives) began decades earlier...
