Censorship
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More on Censorship. |
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"Why do so many of these cranks also make predictions which the proper people fail to make? Is that why they have to be suppressed?" - Ivor Catt This next item was written by Nigel Cooik Back in Feb 1997 I started "Science
World" magazine ISSN 1367-6172, to try to publicise Catt's work in an
efficient way, having failed to get some articles into other places. This
failed totally, since the New Scientist (which is about 50% job adverts) has
got a complete monopoly of the market. It would take a large marketing budget
before any rival would even get distribution, plus of course professional
printing (I was using a high street print shop, which pushed up unit costs
and did not give the professional finish of trade printing). It was a waste
of time. None of the review copies sent to newspapers and other magazines
were picked up as news stories. Newspapers will fall for Piltdown man, Cold
Fusion and String Theory, but not the hard facts. So I was interested to read
the following article: http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-10-t-000059.html
: "Refereed Journals: Do
They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy? by [Professor] Frank J Tipler Abstract- The notion that a scientific idea cannot be considered intellectually respectable until it has first appeared in a "peer" reviewed journal did not become widespread until after World War II. Copernicus's heliocentric system, Galileo's mechanics, Newton's grand synthesis - these ideas never appeared first in journal articles. They appeared first in books, reviewed prior to publication only by their authors, or by their authors' friends. Even Darwin never submitted his idea of evolution driven by natural selection to a journal to be judged by "impartial" referees. Darwinism indeed first appeared in a journal, but one under the control of Darwin's friends. And Darwin's article was completely ignored. Instead, Darwin made his ideas known to his peers and to the world at large through a popular book: On the Origin of Species. I shall argue that prior to the Second World War the refereeing process, even where it existed, had very little effect on the publication of novel ideas, at least in the field of physics. But in the last several decades, many outstanding physicists have complained that their best ideas - the very ideas that brought them fame - were rejected by the refereed journals. Thus, prior to the Second World War, the refereeing process worked primarily to eliminate crackpot papers. Today, the refereeing process works primarily to enforce orthodoxy. I shall offer evidence that "peer" review is NOT peer review: the referee is quite often not as intellectually able as the author whose work he judges. We have pygmies standing in judgment on giants. I shall offer suggestions on ways to correct this problem, which, if continued, may seriously impede, if not stop, the advance of science."
Notice that the very first time Einstein ever underwent peer-review was in 1936, and he blew his top at the CONCEPT of peer-review, refusing to ever again submit to the journal (it was the Physical Review): "... the final [gravitational wave denying] manuscript was prepared and sent to the Physical Review. It was returned to him accompanied by a lengthy referee report in which clarifications were requested. Einstein was enraged and wrote to the editor that he objected to his paper being shown to colleagues prior to publication. The editor courteously replied that refereeing was a procedure generally applied to all papers submitted to his journal, adding that he regretted that Einstein may not have been aware of this custom. Einstein sent the paper to the Journal of the Franklin Institute and, apart from one brief note of rebuttal, never published in the Physical Review again." - Abraham Pais, "Subtle is the Lord: the Science and the Life of Albert Einstein", Oxford University Press, 1982, quoted at http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-6/p9.html (In this case the peer-reviewers were actually correct and Einstein was wrong. The point is, Einstein felt that his paper should have been published, and critics should have been able to criticise it later. Einstein did not feel it was right to censor publication because of alleged errors.)
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