re: #343 vxbush

I had a friend with a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology tell me that of the journals he read, he felt that as many as 1/3 might have serious problems with them that would be overturned later. That’s rare to see in mathematics. We have papers get overturned because counterexamples are finally shown to prove a paper wrong, but that doesn’t seem to happen as often in math as it does in other fields—if my friend’s estimate is right.

Mathematics is a very special case. Most mathematicians are pretty good at what they do, and there is no pesky mother nature to show up and put the kabash on your ideas.

I am not a biologist so I can not comment on that field. What I can say though is that the way science works - the way it really works and is supposed to work, is that you put out in good faith the best and strongest story you can. The rest of the community looks at it. Sometimes people are wrong. They are not obviously wrong at first glance. It is rare for a top tier paper to publish something completely flaky (but it does happen). Sometimes, people might not be wrong, but they don’t have as much of a slam dunk as they thought, and sometimes, A null result is still a result.

Eventually enough data comes in to put the question to rest.

On the other hand, something with the chops will get recognized very quickly more often than not. In an age of rapid communications with tens of thousands of researchers, a really earth shaking bit of research has a very good chance of getting seen quickly. Relativity and QM did not languish in obscurity as a great example…neither did gauge theory or the transistor.

The flip side of this is that something that sounds earth shattering but does not have the chops will face a very quick cull. Cold Fusion is an example - though that is a special case, Fleischman and Pons never published.