Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Nobel Prizes

  • Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)

    Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes, edited by anthropologists Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, so compelling. The book has 30 chapters written by 33 people, each one exploring the oft-hidden colonial undertones of words in everyday Indian English, and by extension documenting how deceptively treacherous the task of decolonialising the things the words refer to is — and many of them intersect with science in practice.

    Indeed my own entry point into this book was half my general interest in Renny’s work, which to an amateur historian of science like me has been constantly insightful, and half my long-standing frustrations with how India and the Indian state commemorate science. On the occasion of National Science Day, which is today, I had an op-ed published in The Hindu on February 26 on why decolonialising science in India also requires Indians to “de-Nobelise” science, including shedding their fondness for individual geniuses in favour of the collective labour that science actually needs to function. Excerpt:

    The keywords … clarify what a de-Nobelised imagination of science, paralleling the decolonisation of science, would require. It would force India to ask how Indians produce the thing called ‘recognition’ — through discoveries and papers as much as by institutions that sort labour into celebrated and hidden.

    National Science Day, then, should not simply reproduce a Nobel-shaped story about genius and external validation. It should become an annual day of discussion of what counts as science, including the work of technicians, field staff, nurses, lab attendants, data collectors, and others whose labour is essential to make new knowledge but is rarely commemorated.

    Good scientific practice requires us to regularly recalibrate the instruments to make sure they haven’t become less precise. Language, Decolonial Keywords shows, is the same way and we need to constantly recalibrate it for the same reasons.

    For example, a mind accustomed to scientists’ oft-universalist claims will find the book unsettling because of how consistently it exposes such universalism to be a hoax. In her chapter, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies political theorist Prathama Banerjee has explored the idea of “shunya”. The global history of mathematics celebrates this entity, commonly equated to the entity called zero, as India’s gift to the world — a numerical placeholder that liberated mathematics from physically counting objects and eventually making calculus and modern computing possible. But if you keep reading, you’ll find that “shunya” was originally a profound ontological concept in Buddhist philosophy, an expression of emptiness and the absence of a permanent ‘self’. And that when modern mathematics extracted the concept, it discarded the philosophical attachments, effectively stripping the word of its ability to critique social hierarchies like caste, which in fact banks on the illusion of a permanent ‘self’.

    In addition to the book’s chapters on ‘jugaad’, ‘poromboke’, and ‘laboratory’, which I tried to explore in my piece, the same theme is also on display in the chapter on “Igu”, the shaman of the Idu Mishmi people in Arunachal Pradesh, especially the tension between Western scientific taxonomy and indigenous ecological networks, written by Ambika Aiyadurai and Razzeko Delley, and the chapter on “Adivasiyat” by Roshan Praveen Xalxo.

    Under the gaze of either modern medicine or conservation biology, a shaman comes across as a psychological curiosity and indigenous land rights as a consequence of politics. However, as Aiyadurai, Delley, and Xalxo set out, the words “Igu” and “Adivasiyat” really recall a “multispecies world” or a “multibeing cosmos” — recalling the writing of anthropologist Anna Tsing in 2013 — where rivers and spirits participate in making and maintaining the ecological network. And we don’t have to abdicate the scientific method to recognise that these indigenous vocabularies offer a sophisticated and importantly localised understanding of an environmental balance that the technocratic and extractivist models of the modern Indian state are themselves abdicating.

    My natural scepticism sometimes (and only sometimes) flares up when I find the word “decolonial” because too often these days, and almost always in certain political contexts, “decolonialising science” in the contemporary Indian context has become a Trojan horse for right-wing nativism, where mythological allegories are retrofitted as ‘ancient’ quantum physics and surgery. But to their credit, Thomas and Perera and the chapters’ various authors are acutely aware of and make honest attempts to sidestep this danger. For example Harshana Rambukwella’s chapter on “Chinthanaya”, the Sinhala term for “thought” or “indigenous epistemology”, is carefully to separate its origins as an anti-colonial concept from how the island country’s majoritarian nationalists weaponised it during the COVID-19 pandemic to push some medical professionals to promote one charlatan’s “divine syrup” as a cure.

    Decolonial Keywords is a dense book steeped in the theoretical frameworks of history, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. The chapters dealing with the literary nuances of medieval poetry and the exact etymological roots of regional dialects in particular require quite a bit of patience — but the intellectual payoff is guaranteed. It’s also nice to have critical work like Decolonial Keywords that presents morsels of analysis and perspectives on a variety of topics because in this field, it’s generally an entire book on a single topic.

  • Mokyr hearts Nobel Prizes

    I don’t like Joel Mokyr’s history of progress and have written about that before. I also have a longer analysis and explanation of my issues coming soon in The Hindu. On December 8 I got more occasion to critique his thinking over his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, after receiving the prize that applied to his inchoate history of European Enlightenment a sheen of credibility I (and others) don’t think it deserves. In his lecture (transcribed in full here), Mokyr said:

    I have argued at great length that these four conditions [incentives for elite innovators; a competitive “market for ideas”; talented people having the freedom to go where they like; a somewhat ‘activist state’] held increasingly in Europe between 1450 and 1750, the three centuries leading up to the industrial revolution. That is the kind of environment that led increasingly to incredibly creative innovative people: Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, James Watt, Adam Smith, Antoine Lavoisier, and Leonhard Euler, [something indecipherable], Ludwig van Beethoven. These are all people who came up with brand new ideas in an environment that supported them, if not perfectly at least far better than anything in the past.

    The question is: do these conditions hold today? I would put it this way: the incentives in propositional knowledge in science are still there and they’re stronger and larger and more pervasive than ever. The market for ideas today provides unprecedented rewards and incentives to successful intellectual innovators, particularly in science. We have hundreds of thousands of people who work in intellectual endeavours, most of them (but not all) in universities. So what we do is we offer them what most of these people need more than anything else, which is financial security, which is tenure and of course in research institutions you get things like named chairs. Then we have rewards and of course there’s a whole pyramid of rewards at which the Nobel Prize and the Abel Prize presumably stand at the very peak, but there are many many other rewards, memberships in academies, and prizes for the best papers and the best books, and honorary degrees.

    The funny thing is these incentives are cheap relative to the benefits that these people bestow on humankind, and that is I think a critical thing. Of course, in addition to all that there’s name recognition, fame through mass media, and, perhaps most important, these things lead to peer recognition: many academics really want to be respected by their peers, by other people like themselves, and of course in addition for a very few you know there’s lots of money to be made if they work in the right fields and get it right. Now, most of these incentives were already noticeable in about 1500, but in some ways the 20th century has done far better than anybody before.

    In short Joel Mokyr treats rewards like the Nobel Prize to be a low-cost “pyramid” of incentives that helps the “upper tail” of society generate ideas. However the Nobel Prizes aren’t only incentives for innovation: they also exemplify how modern societies manage credit and legitimacy, which are examples of social relations, in ways that shape what innovation looks like and who benefits. The irony here is thus that the Nobel Prizes are part of the same system of social relations he underplays in his theory of progress — and a good example of his blindspot vis-à-vis the history of Europe’s progress.

    According to Mokyr, ideas originate in the minds of an intellectual elite — his “upper tail” of society — and society’s job is to reward them. The diffusion of ideas is secondary in his framing. However, scientists, social science scholars, and historians of science have all critiqued the fact that the Nobel Prizes systematically individualise what’s almost always distributed work and sideline the science labour of laboratory managers, technicians, makers of instruments, graduate students, maintenance staff, supply chains, and of course state procurement. The Prizes advance a picture of “elite incentives” working to advance science when in fact it’s predicated equally, if not more, on questions of status and hierarchy, particularly on admission, patronage, language, funding, and geopolitics.

    And in their turn the Prizes impose inefficiencies of their own. As we’ve seen before with the story of Brian Keating, they can reorganise research agendas — and more broadly they fetishise problems in science that can be solved and easily be verified to have been solved by a small number of people ‘first’.

    Later in his lecture Mokyr further says:

    … when technology changes, institutions have to adapt in various ways, and the problem is that they are usually slow to adapt. It takes decades until various parliamentary committees and political forces agree that some form of regulation or some form of control is necessary. And what evolutionary theory suggests is that adaptation to a changing environment is quite possible provided the changes in the technological environment are not too fast and not too abrupt. A sudden discontinuous shock will lead to mass extinctions and catastrophe; we know this is true from evolutionary history.

    So there’s some concern that the acceleration in the rate of technological change in recent decades cannot be matched by institutional adaptation. What’s more, the acceleration implied by the last 10 years’ advances in AI and similar fields [suggests where] this is going to be a problem. Certain technological inventions have led to political polarisations, through social media for instance. This is something we haven’t fully solved and it’s not clear that we will be able to.

    TL;DR: technology often advances faster than institutions adapt and politics, misinformation, nationalism, and xenophobia threaten the conditions for progress.

    But then wouldn’t this mean then that incentives for the elites are the easy part? That is, Nobel Prizes or other incentives like them don’t fix these problems, in fact they may even distract from them by implying the main thing is to simply keep “geniuses” motivated.

  • A bad Nobel for Mokyr

    The American-Israeli economic historian Joel Mokyr has been awarded one half of the 2025 special Nobel Prize for economics “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress”.

    Now, by rewarding particular achievements over others, the Nobel Prizes are in general guilty of rendering them seemingly more virtuous. This is at best a false virtue that props up one more axis of discrimination. For example, the science prizes (for medicine, physics, and chemistry) restrict “what counts as ‘world-changing’ science to that published in ‘high impact’ western journals, led by scientists affiliated with well-heeled European or North American institutes, and framed within the disciplinary traditions dominant in these regions,” to quote from a recent piece of mine.

    This said, it’s still possible to find a kernel of indisputable facts — the high-quality work itself — within this morass that still deserves to be celebrated. This year’s peace and economics prizes, for Marina Corina Machado and Mokyr respectively, have however called even this courtesy into question for their wins.

    For the case against Machado, I recommend my colleague Srinivasan VR’s profile and analysis of her legacy. As for Mokyr: my principal objection is the Eurocentrism of his theory. Mokyr has attributed the Industrial Revolution to the European Enlightenment’s intellectual openness and implied that these qualities were uniquely Western. However, many scholars have recorded that regions such as China and parts of South and Southeast Asia displayed comparable technological sophistication, commercial dynamism, and administrative capacity well before the 18th century — and on the back of this evidence other scholars, including the so-called ‘California School’, have objected to Mokyr’s framing.

    Europe’s eventual industrial leadership wasn’t the result of cultural superiority, as Mokyr would have it, but because of specific material advantages, including those accruing from its colonial exploits and its global trade networks. Mokyr’s interpretation however risks reducing the global divergence in industrialisation to differences in cultural attitudes, downplaying the role of imperial extraction.

    Equally important is the fact that this is interpretation: Mokyr’s theory isn’t empirically verified. What he has called his evidence for a self-sustaining relationship between scientific inquiry and industrial productivity is largely derived from selective readings of correspondence among intellectuals, the minutes of learned societies, and anecdotal accounts of inventors. These materials do reveal the existence of intellectual exchange but they don’t show that such exchange measurably increased productivity or the diffusion of new technologies — nor do they confirm that the regions or industries most exposed to “useful knowledge”, in his words, grew faster than those that were not.

    Independent scrutiny of industrial output records, patent data, and wage histories from the 18th and the early 19th centuries has consistently come away with weak correlations, at best, between sites of scientific activity and industrial success. Britain’s early industrial centres were often driven by the availability of particular resources, entrepreneurial finance, and organised labour rather than by their proximity to experimental philosophy.

    Yet Mokyr’s thesis turns a coincidental association into a mechanism of causality. His critics are right to argue that the supposed feedback loop between propositional and prescriptive knowledge remains a theoretical construct, supported by narratives and his own convictions rather than empirical proof. And now the Nobel Foundation’s endorsement has conferred to these unsubstantiated convictions the sheen of authority, and all the institutional prestige and public deference that entails.

  • Majorana 1, science journalism, and other things

    While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, the scientific achievements they have revealed have been some of the funnest concepts I’ve discovered in science, including the clever ways in which scientists revealed them. If I had to rank them on this metric, the first place would be a tie between the chemistry and the physics prizes of 2016. The chemistry prize went to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart, and Ben Feringa for “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”. Likewise, the physics prize was shared between David Thouless, Duncan Haldane, and John Kosterlitz “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”. If you like, you can read my piece about the 2016 chemistry prize here. A short excerpt about the laureates’ work:

    … it is fruitless to carry on speculating about what these achievements could be good for. J. Fraser Stoddart, who shared the Nobel Prize last year with Feringa for having assembled curious molecular arrangements like Borromean rings, wrote in an essay in 2005, “It is amazing how something that was difficult to do in the beginning will surely become easy to do in the event of its having been done. The Borromean rings have captured our imagination simply because of their sheer beauty. What will they be good for? Something for sure, and we still have the excitement of finding out what that something might be.” Feringa said in a 2014 interview that he likes to build his “own world of molecules”. In fact, Stoddart, Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage shared the chemistry prize for having developed new techniques to synthesise and assemble organic molecules in their pursuits.

    In the annals of the science Nobel Prizes, there are many, many laureates who allowed their curiosity about something rather than its applications to guide their research. In the course of these pursuits, they developed techniques, insights, technologies or something else that benefited their field as a whole but which wasn’t the end goal. Over time the objects of many of these pursuits have also paved the way for some futuristic technology themselves. All of this is a testament to the peculiar roads the guiding light of curiosity opens. Of course, scientists need specific conditions of their work to be met before they can commitment themselves to such lines of inquiry. For just two examples, they shouldn’t be under pressure to publish papers and they shouldn’t have to worry about losing their jobs if they don’t file patents. I can also see where the critics of such blue-sky research stand and why: while there are benefits, it’s hard to say ahead of time what they might be and when they might appear.

    This said, the work that won the 2016 physics prize is of a similar nature and also particularly relevant in light of a ‘development’ in the realm of quantum computing earlier this month. Two of the three laureates, Thouless and Kosterlitz, performed an experiment in the 1970s in which they found something unusual. To quote from my piece in The Hindu on February 23:

    If you cool some water vapour, it will become water and then ice. If you keep lowering the temperature until nearly absolute zero, the system will have minimal thermal energy, allowing quantum states of matter to show. In the 1970s, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless found that the surface of superfluid helium sometimes developed microscopic vortices that moved in pairs. When they raised the temperature, the vortices decoupled and moved freely. It was a new kind of … phase transition: the object’s topological attributes changed in response to changes in energy [rather than it turning from liquid to gas].

    The findings here, followed by many others that followed, together with efforts by physicists to describe this new property of matter using mathematics, in harmony with other existing theories of nature all laid the foundation for Microsoft’s February 19 announcement: that it had developed a quantum-computing chip named Majorana 1 with topological qubits inside. (For more on this, please read my February 23 piece.) Microsoft has been trying to build this chip since at least 2000, when a physicist then on the company’s payroll named Alexei Kitaev published a paper exploring its possibility. Building the thing was a tall order, requiring advances in a variety of fields that eventually had to be brought together in just the right way, but Microsoft knew that if it succeeded the payoff would be tremendous.

    This said, even if this wasn’t curiosity-driven research on Microsoft’s part, such research has already played a big role in both the company’s and the world’s fortunes. In the world’s fortune because, as with the work of Stoddart, Feringa, and Sauvage, the team explored, invented and/or refined new methods en route to building Majorana 1, methods which the rest of the world can potentially use to solve other problems. And in the company’s fortune because while Kitaev’s paper was motivated by the possibility of a device of considerable technological and commercial value, it drew from a large body of knowledge that — at the time it was unearthed and harmonised with the rest of science — wasn’t at all concerned with a quantum-computing chip in its then-distant future. For all its criticism, blue-sky research leads to some outcomes that no other forms of research can. This isn’t an argument in support of it so much as in defence of not sidelining it altogether.

    While I have many issues with how the Nobel Prizes are put together as an institution, I’ve covered each edition with not inconsiderable excitement[1]. Given the fondness of the prize-giving committee for work on or with artificial intelligence last year, it’s possible there’s a physics prize vouchsafed for work on the foundations of contemporary quantum computers in the not-too-distant future. When it comes to pass, I will be all too happy to fall back on the many pieces I’ve written on this topic over the years, to be able to confidently piece together the achievements in context and, personally, to understand the work beyond my needs as a journalist, as a global citizen. But until that day, I can’t justify the time I do spend reading up about and writing on this and similar topics as a journalist in a non-niche news publication — one publishing reports, analyses, and commentary for a general audience rather than those with specialised interests.

    The justification is necessary at all because the time I spend doing something is time spent not doing something else and the opportunity cost needs to be rational in the eyes of my employers. At the same time, journalism as a “history of now” would fail if it didn’t bring the ideas, priorities, and goals at play in the development of curiosity-driven research and — with the benefit of hindsight — its almost inevitable value for commerce and strategy to the people at large. This post so far, until this point, is the preamble I had in mind for my edition of The Hindu’s Notebook column today. Excerpt:

    It isn’t until a revolutionary new technology appears that the value of investing in basic research becomes clear. Many scientists are rooting for more of it. India’s National Science Day, today, is itself rooted in celebrating the discovery of the Raman effect by curiosity-driven study. The Indian government also wants such research in this age of quantum computing, renewable energy, and artificial intelligence. But it isn’t until such technology appears that the value of investing in a science journalism of the underlying research — slow-moving, unglamorous, not application-oriented — also becomes clear. It might even be too late by then.

    The scientific ideas that most journalists have overlooked are still very important: they’re the pillars on which the technologies reshaping the world stand. So it’s not fair that they’re overlooked when they’re happening and obscured by other concerns by the time they’ve matured. Without public understanding, input, and scrutiny in the developmental phase, the resulting technologies have fewer chances to be democratic, and the absence of the corresponding variety of journalism is partly to blame.

    I would have liked to include the preamble with the piece itself but the word limit is an exacting 620. This is also why I left something else unsaid in the piece, something important for me, the author, to have acknowledged. After the penultimate line — “You might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” — I wanted to say there’s a confounding factor: the skills, choices, and circumstances of the journalists themselves. If a journalist isn’t a good writer[2] or doesn’t have the assistance of good editors, what they write about curiosity-driven research, which already runs on weak legs among the people at large, may simply pass through their feeds and newsletters without inviting even a “huh?”. But as I put down the aforementioned line, a more discomfiting thought erupted at the back of my mind.

    In 2017, on the Last Word on Nothing blog, science journalist Cassandra Willyard made a passionate case for the science journalism of obscure things to put people at its centre in order to be effective. The argument’s allure was obvious but it has never sat well with me. The narrative power of human emotion, drawn from the highs or lows in the lives of the people working on obscure scientific ideas, is in being able to render those ideas more relatable. But my view is that there’s a lot out there we may never write about if we couldn’t also write about what highs/lows it rendered among its discoverers or beholders, and more so if such highs/lows don’t exist at all, as is often the case with a big chunk of curiosity-driven research. Willyard herself had used the then-recent example of the detection of gravitational waves from two neutron stars smashing into each other billions of lightyears away. This is conveniently (but perhaps not by her design) an example of Big Science where many people spent a long time looking for something and finally found it. There’s certainly a lot of drama here.

    But the reason I call having to countenance Willyard’s arguments discomfiting is that I understand what she’s getting at and I know I’m rebutting it on the back of only a small modicum of logic. It’s a sentimental holdout, even: I don’t want to have to care about the lives of other people when I know I care very well for how we extracted a world’s worth of new information by ‘reading’ gravitational waves emitted by a highly unusual cosmic event. The awe, to me, is right there. Yet I’m also keenly aware how impactful the journalism advocated by Willyard can be, having seen it in ‘action’ in the feature-esque pieces published by science magazines, where the people are front and centre, and the number of people that read and talk about them.

    I hold out because I believe there are, like me, many people out there (I’ve met a few) that can be awed by narratives of neutron-star collisions that dispense with invoking the human condition. I also believe that while a large number of people may read those feature-esque pieces, I’m not convinced they have a value that goes beyond storytelling, which is of course typically excellent. But I suppose those narratives of purely scientific research devoid of human protagonists (or antagonists) would have to be at least as excellent in order to captivate audiences just as well. If a journalist — together with the context in which they produce their work — isn’t up to the mark yet, they should strive to be. And this striving is essential if “you might think just the fact that journalists are writing about an idea should fetch it from the fringes to the mainstream, but it does not” is to be meaningful.

    [1] Not least because each Nobel Prize announcement is accompanied by three press releases: one making the announcement, one explaining the prize-winning work to a non-expert audience, and one explaining it in its full technical context. Journalism with these resources is actually quite enjoyable. This helps, too.

    [2] I’m predominantly a textual journalist and default to “write” when writing about journalistic communication. But of course in this sentence I mean journalists who aren’t good writers and/or good video-makers or editors and/or good podcasters, etc.

  • On the 2024 Nobel Prizes and the Rosalind Lee issue

    The Nobel Prizes are a deeply flawed institution both out of touch with science as it is done today and with an outsized influence on scientific practice at the most demanding levels. Yet these relationships all persist with the prizes continuing to crown some of the greatest achievements in the history of modern science.

    The prizes are exclusive by design and their prestige is enforced through a system of secrecy: the reasons for picking each laureate are locked away for 50 years even as the selection process happens behind closed doors. In keeping with a historical tradition of all prizes being distinguished by their laureates, the Nobel Prizes are sought after so scientists can enter the same ranks that hold Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, etc.

    Of course the institution like others of its kind reinforces the need for itself, creating self-fulfilling conditions by mooching off the reputation of scientists who have laboured for decades in specific social, economic, cultural, and political contexts to produce knowledge of incredible value and in return conferring a reputation of a different kind. This is why Jean-Paul Sartre tried to decline the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964.

    Then again, the way the award-giving foundation conducts the prizes’ announcements has also helped to ameliorate the neglectful treatment many sections of the mainstream media, especially in India, have meted out to the sort of scientific work the prizes fete, even if the foundation’s conduct also panders to the causes of such treatment.

    The prizes

    I think the Nobel Prizes for physiology/medicine and for physics caught many science communicators off guard because they were both concerned with very involved pieces of work with no direct applications. The medicine prize was for the discovery of microRNA and post-transcriptional gene regulation, which when it happened overturned what biologists had assumed was a complete picture of how the body’s cells regulate genes to make different proteins.

    The physics prize was for the first work on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which produced a machine-friendly version of cognition by drawing on ideas in biology, neuropsychology, and statistical mechanics. If this work hadn’t happened, ChatGPT may not exist today, but several other developments built on the first ANNs to produce more new knowledge whose accumulation eventually led to ChatGPT et al. Ergo, calling ChatGPT et al. an application of the first ANNs would be thoroughly misguided.

    The chemistry prize — for the development of computational tools to design proteins and to predict their structures — presented a slightly different problem: the tools’ advent meant humans suddenly found themselves spending much less time on deciphering the structures, yet the tools didn’t, and still don’t, say why proteins prefer these structures over others. Scientists still need to figure out the why by themselves.

    All this said, I’m grateful this year as I’ve been before for the prizes’ ability to throw up an opportunity for all sections of the media to discuss scientific work many of them would most likely have neglected otherwise. Reading the research papers that first reported the existence of microRNA and the papers that explained how models to understand exotic states of matter lent themselves to the first ANN concepts allowed me personally to refresh my basics as well as be reminded of the ability of blue-sky scicomm — as a direct counterpart of blue-sky research, one that isn’t fixated on applications — to wow us.

    This post benefited from feedback from Thomas Manuel and Mahima Jain.

    The Rosalind Lee issue

    To reiterate from the introduction, the Nobel Prizes are one institution with deep and well-defined flaws. And I have learnt from (journalistic) experience that there’s no changing its mind. It’s too big to change and doesn’t admit the need to do so, and its members have had no compunctions about articulating that in public. The vast majority of scientists also subscribe to the prizes’ value and their general desirability. So it is my view today that we work around the prizes and/or renounce the prizes altogether when dealing with the award-giving group’s choices.

    A third option is to change the foundation’s mind but this requires a considerable amount of collective work to which I doubt more than a few would like to dedicate themselves. Mind-changing work is demanding work. Then again the problem is if you fall anywhere in between these two more-viable options, you risk admitting other possibilities vis-à-vis the Nobel Prizes that (I imagine) you’d rather not.

    For a background on the Rosalind Lee issue, I suggest you browse X.com. My notes on it follow:

    (i) The Nobel Foundation has historically reserved the Nobel Prizes for persons who conceived of important ideas and made testable predictions about them. The latter is important. IIRC this is why SN Bose didn’t win a Nobel Prize for coming up with Bose-Einstein particle statistics. Albert Einstein could have won instead because he built on Bose’s ideas to predict the existence of a particular state of matter: the Bose-Einstein condensate. Who came up with the testable predictions in the paper that won Victor Ambros a share of the medicine Nobel Prize?

    I’m not directly defending the exclusion of Rosalind Lee, who was the first author of that and in fact many of the more important papers Ambros published in his career. Instead, I’m pointing to an answer that could explain her exclusion with a reminder that the answer is flawed and that it has always been flawed. I suppose I’m saying that we couldn’t have expected better. 🙃

    (ii) Physics World recently published an interview with Lars Brink, a physicist who has been part of the decision-making for many physics prizes the last decade. Brinks bluntly states at one point that the Nobel Academy doesn’t give the prizes to collaborations or in fact even more than three people at a time because they don’t want 5,000 people (for example at CERN) claiming they’re Nobel laureates all of a sudden. There is an explicit and deliberate design here to keep the prizes exclusive, like Hermes handbags.

    (iii) The first author is often the one who designs the experiment, performs it, collects the data, analyses it, etc. — basically everything beyond, but not necessarily excluding, the act of having an idea itself and including most of the legwork. The Nobel Prizes however are not awards for legwork. This sucks because it’s a profound misunderstanding of the people required to produce good-quality scientific knowledge.

    Thanks to the influence the prizes exert on the scientific community, the people who are left out also fade further — in the public view and also in terms of not being able to benefit from the systematic rewards vouchsafed for the Nobel laureates who are now institutions unto themselves. The fading is likely compounded for people already struggling to be noticed in the scientific literature: the “technicians” who equip, maintain, and operate laboratory instruments, among others (a.k.a. the Matthew effect). Of course the axis of discrimination is gendered as well: as one friend put it, “the ‘leg work’ of science is historically feminised”, and when awards and other forms of recognition exclude such work they perpetuate the Matilda effect.

    Overall, whether the prize-giving body is aware of these narratives and issues is moot. What matters is that it acknowledges and responds to them — which it has signalled it won’t do. QED.

    (iv) In fact, all these rules of the Nobel Prizes are arbitrary. It’s effectively a sport and a poorly managed one at that. You make up a playing field, publicise some of the rules, keep the governing body beyond reach or reproach, hide the scorecard, and then you say you have to jump five feet in the air to qualify. The outragers are raising their voices for Rosalind Lee (what does she want, by the way?) but not for the first authors of all the other papers by other laureates over the years. If they don’t belong to marginalised social groups, is it okay to leave them out? Then again these are moot questions, pursuits leading nowhere at all thanks to the Nobel Prizes’ presumption that they’re not of this world.

    The Nobel Prizes have also wronged many women, but I can’t claim to know whether there’s a case-by-case explanation (with arbitrary foundations) or if it was a systematic program to do so. Both seem equally likely given how slow attitudes have been to change on this front. This said, just because women have been wronged doesn’t mean all forms of reparation will be equally useful. More specifically, what will breaking the (arbitrary) rules do to change for women in science?

    Obviously this is part of a broader question about the influence of the Nobel Prizes on doing science. Mukund Thattai ran a survey on Twitter years ago asking scientists about why they got into or stayed in science. “Because of a Nobel laureate” received the fewest votes in a large pool of respondents. It wasn’t a representative survey but it does hint at an important piece of reality. Once we start to argue that including Rosalind Lee would have been better, we also tacitly admit the Nobel Prizes matter for who chooses to stay in science and who is condemned to fade — but do they?

    On the other side of this coin lie all the other prizes that did fete Rosalind Lee along with Victor Ambros. If we’d like to have any prizes at all (I don’t but YMMV), shall we celebrate the Newcomb Cleveland Prize more than the Nobel Prizes? Likewise, by railing against Rosalind Lee’s exclusion on arbitrary grounds, what do we hope to achieve? It may be more gainful to spread awareness of the Nobel Prizes’ flaws and finitude and focus on the deeper question of how the opportunities to win X award can influence the way science is done, who does it, and why.

  • Numbed by numbers

    Couple things in my news feed this morning that really woke me up — one a startling statistic and the other a reminder of what statistics miss. The first from Nature, ‘How to win a Nobel prize: what kind of scientist scoops medals?’:

    John W. Strutt, who won a physics prize in 1904 for his work on the properties of gases, has 228 academic descendants with Nobels — his students, their students and so on. … An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history. Only 32 laureates … have no connection to the bigger academic family.

    Meaning it’s nearly impossible for ‘true’ outsiders to break in. Either you become part of the The Network or you have a very low chance of winning a Nobel Prize. Of course the prize-giving apparatus isn’t a machine. There are humans making these decisions and clearly in a famously human way: not really paying attention to the consequences of their preferences or assuming that that doesn’t, or even shouldn’t, matter.

    But what does The Network say about science itself, especially about good* science and where that gets done? That is, what institutional mechanisms and/or forces are (even passively) encouraging the scientists who do such work to clump together?

    One factor that immediately comes to mind is funding: in the typical Indian experience, because most places of research have traditionally not been well-funded, the government or some philanthropic entity endeavours to set up a few facilities focused on research and funds them well, while the rest struggle on.

    On a related note, should the diffusion of researchers who produce good-quality research (and know how to do it) into previously neglected locales be desirable?

    Next, the reminder of what statistics miss:

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    The French researcher and physician Didier Raoult has been banned from practising medicine for two years. It is the latest and probably most significant sanction against Raoult after he became infamous during the pandemic for his enthusiastic support for hydroxychloroquine even though the drug lacked evidence of its efficacy against COVID-19.

    His claims brought the spotlight on him as he probably intended but then expanded to reveal he had published too many papers — much more than should be humanly possible. But Raoult took pride in his research metrics, so even as research integrity investigators including Elisabeth Bik revealed dire problems in his published** papers — including image manipulation and ethical lapses in clinical trials that rendered them illegal — Raoult and his supporters came out swinging on social media.

    He also filed a lawsuit against Bik alleging she and others were besmirching his name without reason. Raoult eventually lost these disputes and in the process the trust and respect of the research community. Now his medical license has been revoked. He was retired but the action was clearly symbolic: Raoult is done.

    It took Bik’s and her peers’ scepticism to reveal the extent of Raoult’s misdemeanours. His metrics betrayed nothing of it except through their largeness.

    As if on cue, The Hindu published an excellent opinion piece by S. Swaminathan today about why and how we educate people, including those who become professional scientists:

    The metrics-focused system has created a situation which implies that education is a market rather than a citizen’s right and the state’s duty.

    * “Good” here means worthy of winning a Nobel Prize, not good per se.

    ** Remember that they were published, meaning the journals that did are answerable, too.

  • Marginalia: Romila on textbooks, Rapido ad, Nobel nonsense

    We may go on deleting sections of our history but in the world outside where there are multiple centres of research into the Indian past, and many scholars, there these expunged sections from books used in India will continue to be studied. They will be subjected to new methods of analyses, will be commented upon, will enrich the understanding of India with new knowledge, and all this will be incorporated into the history of India that will be taught everywhere except in India. We in India will not know anything about that section of Indian history which has been deleted from our books.

    Outside India, the multiple cultures of India and their achievements will be studied as part of Indian history and Indian culture, irrespective of the religion of the dynasties that may have presided over the achievements. They will be studied in universities, libraries and museums dedicated to the study of India, as a continuation of not only the Indian past but also of the past pertaining to happenings current in various parts of the world. These will have pride of place not only in the history of India but in the history of human achievements. But we in India will be entirely ignorant of their significance since we shall not know them as a part of Indian history nor as a part of other histories of the world. These would have been cultures that we once recognised as those to which we once contributed, and with which we once had exchanges, when we created the Indian civilisation of past times.

    ‘If NCERT Has its Way, the Study of Indian History Will Move Entirely Outside of India’, Romila Thapar, The Wire

    Well written by historian Romila Thapar, on the NCERT’s decision to excise some important parts of Indian history from school textbooks. First, it’s hard not to come away after reading this being struck by how reminiscent this ‘moving out’ of scholarship is of what colonialism inflicted on India, especially in terms of the natural resources that were transferred from India to the United Kingdom, never to be returned – resources that both the left and the right like to thump their chests over. Self-inflicted colonialism is worse than tragedy. I did think the “we in India will not know anything about that section of Indian history which has been deleted from our books” part was a bit of a reach because I know from experience that as long as you have access to uncensored information on the internet and a few people in your familial or social circles to nudge you to access it, it’s possible to start questioning ideologies, privileges, faith, assumptions, etc. This said, I don’t claim to understand the consequences of depriving relatively very young people of a wholesome history education, which only heightens the risk of ignorance if the people around them agree with their syllabus. Third, while alt-history edits to school textbooks have really brought the problem home, they have been preceded in time by, among others, the Vedas and Ayurvedic texts. They weren’t literary edited; however, the government changed what most people believed their contents to be. And I suspect it will be possible to see in the textbooks’ fate parallels to what befell the Vedas and Ayurveda: one fed Hindutva myths about the mythical achievements of ‘ancient India’ while the other helped pro-party businessmen commercialise these myths.

    Rapido’s ads continue to be nonsensical, or appeal to sensibilities that on the face of it have nothing to do with public transport and commuting. Last time, the ad with Allu Arjun and Ranbir Kapoor (among others) took a cynical view of road traffic, asking commuters to opt for Rapido’s ‘bike taxis’ because they could cut through traffic and wouldn’t “mince” them up like public buses might, effectively discouraging encouraging unsafe driving on roads and discouraging, to quote myself, “civic disengagement from the task of improving public transport”. A new ad that’s been airing for a week or so has the tagline, “bike-wali taxi, sabse saxi“, to the accompaniment of visual narratives in which there is a long queue of people waiting to catch an auto and a bus packed to the rafters with people. So… I’m to take bike taxis because they’re “sexy?” I don’t get it. Maybe the purpose of the new ad is to be an ad for an ad’s sake, to let people know that such a thing exists, but I’m not sold. It’s still a lot like the first ad, and both of which are like Elon Musk’s comments in the context of his Hyperloop idea: that we should desist from using public transport because we might be travelling with a serial killer (and his hope that someone else will build a Hyperloop provided a high-speed rail line in California, and its higher carrying capacity, is cancelled). In all cases, we have people being asked to take the easy way out, in favour of corporate entities invested in people being concerned only with their own comfort, over forcing the government to do better. The latter is always only going to be hard, requiring public organisation and mobilisation, but never opting for this path just opens the door wider to self-serving companies and further undermine the centrality of public transport to a healthy democracy. If India’s status as a democracy is fading, as even The Lancet noted earlier today, we’re contributing, too.

    Also how much are these bike-wali drivers paid?

    “This is embarrassing,” [Charles Lieber] said at his trial. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”

    ‘Charles Lieber, Ex-Harvard Professor, Sentenced in China Ties Case’, Gina Kolata, The New York Times

    An obligatory reminder that the Nobel Prizes influence how science is practiced – rather than being a completely isolated entity that just selects some arbitrarily defined “best scientific endeavour” and gives it a medal, a certificate, and lots of money. We’ve seen this before with Brian Keating, who made a big mistake before acknowledging it and coming clean. Now that Charles Lieber has committed his blunder, I hope he’ll stop pursuing a Nobel Prize as well and just pursue good science instead. But the ideal, but seemingly also very unlikely, thing to happen would be for scientists at large to understand a) why trying to win a Nobel Prize is not trying to do good science even though the former claims to exclusively reward the latter and b) that almost all ‘prestigious’ honours concerned with scientific work – including the universities to work at, the grants to win, and the journals in which to publish – will over time distort the desirability of different fields of study (and even scientists’ estimate of which questions are worth answering), the contents of the scientific literature, what constitutes ‘success’ (e.g. positive results v. negative results), and who can be considered to be successful. (Pseudo-prestigious awards might be even more dangerous.)

  • The question of Abdus Salam ‘deserving’ his Nobel

    Peter Woit has blogged about an oral history interview with theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow published in 2020 by the American Institute of Physics. (They have a great oral history of physics series you should check out if you’re interested.) Woit zeroed in on a portion in which Glashow talks about his faltering friendship with Steven Weinberg and his issues with Abdus Salam’s nomination for the physics Nobel Prize.

    Glashow, Weinberg and Salam together won this prize in 1979, for their work on the work on electroweak theory, which describes the behaviour of two fundamental forces, the electromagnetic force and the weak force. Glashow recalls that his and Weinberg’s friendship – having studied and worked together for many years – deteriorated in the 1970s, a time in which both scientists were aware that they were due a Nobel Prize. According to Glashow, however, Weinberg wanted the prize to be awarded only to himself and Salam.

    This is presumably because of how the prize-winning work came to be: with Glashow’s mathematical-physical model published in 1960, Weinberg building on it seven years later, with Salam’s two relevant papers appeared a couple years after Glashow’s paper and a year after Weinberg’s. Glashow recalls that Salam’s work was not original, that each of his two papers respectively echoed findings already published in Glashow’s and Weinberg’s papers. Instead, Glashow continues, Salam received the Nobel Prize probably because he had encouraged his peers and his colleagues to nominate him a very large number of times and because he set up the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste.

    This impression, of Salam being undeserving from a contribution-to-physics point of view in Glashow’s telling, is very at odds with the impression of Salam based on reading letters and comments by Weinberg and Pervez Hoodbhoy and by watching the documentary Salam – The First ****** Nobel Laureate.

    The topic of Salam being a Nobel laureate was never uncomplicated, to begin with: he was an Ahmadi Muslim who enjoyed the Pakistan government’s support until he didn’t, when he was forced to flee the country; his intentions with the ICTP – to give scholars from developing countries a way to study physics without having to contend with often-crippling resource constrains – were also noble. Hoodbhoy has also written about the significance of Salam’s work as a physicist and the tragedy of his name and the memories of his contributions having been erased from all the prominent research centres in Pakistan.

    Finally, one of Salam’s nominees for a Nobel Prize was the notable British physicist and Nobel laureate Paul A.M. Dirac, and it seems strange that Dirac would endorse Salam if he didn’t believe Salam’s work deserved it.

    Bearing these facts in mind, Glashow’s contention appears to be limited to the originality of Salam’s work. But to my mind, even if Salam’s work was really derivative, it was at par with that of Glashow and Weinberg. More importantly, while I believe the Nobel Prizes deserve to be abrogated, the prize-giving committee did more good than it might have realised by including Salam among its winners: in the words of Weinberg, “Salam sacrificed a lot of possible scientific productivity by taking on that responsibility [to set up ICTP]. It’s a sacrifice I would not make.”

    Glashow may not feel very well about Salam’s inclusion for the 1979 prize and the Nobel Prizes as we know are only happy to overlook anything other than the scientific work itself, but if the committee really screwed up, then they screwed up to do a good thing.

    Then again, even though Glashow wasn’t alone (he was joined by Martinus J.G. Veltman on his opinions against Salam), the physicists’ community at large doesn’t share his views. Glashow also cites an infamous 2014 paper by Norman Dombey, in which Dombey concluded that Salam didn’t deserve his share of the prize, but the paper’s reputation itself is iffy at best.

    In fact, this is all ultimately a pointless debate: there are just too many people who deserve a Nobel Prize but don’t win it while a deeper dive into the modern history of physics should reveal a near-constant stream of complaints against Nobel laureates and their work by their peers. It should be clear today that both winning a prize and not winning a prize ought to mean nothing to the practice of science.

    The other remarkable thing about Glashow’s comments in the interview (as cited by Woit) is what I like to think of as the seemingly eternal relevance of Brian Keating’s change of mind. Brian Keating is an astrophysicist who was at the forefront of the infamous announcement that his team had discovered evidence of cosmic inflation, an epoch of the early universe in which it is believed to have expanded suddenly and greatly, in March 2014. There were many problems leading up to the announcement but there was little doubt at the time, and Keating also admitted later, that its rapidity was motivated by the temptation to secure a Nobel Prize.

    Many journalists, scientists and others observers of the practice of science routinely and significantly underestimate the effect the Nobel Prizes exert on scientific research. The prospect of winning the prize for supposedly discovering evidence of cosmic inflation caused Keating et al. to not wait for additional, confirmatory data before making their announcement. When such data did arrive, from the Planck telescope collaboration, Keating et al. suffered for it with their reputation and prospects.

    Similarly, Weinberg and Glashow fell out because, according to Glashow, Weinberg didn’t wish Glashow to give a talk in 1979 discussing possible alternatives to the work of Weinberg and Salam because Weinberg thought doing such a thing would undermine his and Salam’s chances of being awarded a Nobel Prize. Eventually it didn’t, but that’s beside the point: this little episode in history is as good an illustration as any of how the Nobel Prizes and their implied promises of laurels and prestige render otherwise smart scientists insecure, petty and elbows-out competitive – in exchange for sustaining an absurd and unjust picture of the scientific enterprise.

    All of this goes obviously against the spirit of science.

  • Hail the Royal Society

    It’s an underappreciated form of our colonial hangover when a body like the Royal Society appoints its first Brazilian member since 1871 (on May 13) and almost everyone including the appointee talks about why the Society continues to be great instead of facing it with hard questions over why it didn’t elect Brazilian scientists into its ranks for 151 years and rejecting the deceptive honour of its admission. It’s a similar story with the Nobel Prizes: no women or no non-white persons win one for decades on end, so when the first exception appears on the scene, it’s because the prizes are great – not because the scientists were perfectly able to labour without the incentives presented by the prizes and certainly not because the prizes are an assertion of colonial power.

    Why don’t the Royal Society or the Nobel Prizes – and for that matter any award-giving entity in India that coasts for decades without acknowledging the work of scientists of non-Brahmin caste denominations – suffer a reputational crisis when their prejudice is spotlighted by their own feeble and frequently meagre attempts to rectify it instead of enjoying a rhetoric suffused with praise for “doing the right thing”?

    Prestige-awarding institutions like the Royal Society must be torn down as a rule of thumb – and we must simultaneously also strive to move past the idea that such institutions are necessary to move the needle in a world that will ultimately only perceive another reminder that prestige is relevant and valuable. This particular brand of iconoclasm is not easier to say and significantly more not-easier to do in our era of crises, when outspoken scientific consensus is a triply valuable thing and bodies like the Royal Society are seen as being necessary to birth, hold and present that consensus to the elite cadres of both science and society – the movers and shakers, as it were. “Hail the Nobel Prizes,” we say – “Raman has won a Nobel Prize” – “the state listens to Raman” – “let’s let Raman run a science institute” – “the institute is producing good work!” – “hail the Nobel Prizes,” we repeat. For example, the new Brazilian appointee to the Royal Society, climate scientist Carlos Nobre, told Reuters: “The Royal Society is giving international recognition to the risks that the Amazon faces. It’s an enormous risk that we could lose the greatest biodiversity and the biggest tropical forest on the planet.”

    But from where I’m sitting, it’s easier to feel the weight of a history that precipitated the need for a Royal Society to return to the climate scientists of Brazil the self-evident relevance of their voices – as well as an elite institution piggybacking on the urgency of the defining crisis of the Anthropocene epoch to right a wrong that should, in fairness, have destroyed it long ago. Then again, I can’t fault Nobre himself because from his point of view he has acquired access to one more pedestal – one to which no other compatriot of his has access – from which to bring the world’s attention to the ruin of the Amazon. Or maybe I do, but not Nobre himself as much as the community of all scientists for not unionising (whether or not in the traditional sense) against the arbitrary selectivism of the Royal Society, et al.[1] and their campaigns of piecemeal restitution.

    [1] It inherits the problems of everything from admission to well-funded science institutes to one’s ability to publish in ‘top’ journals to appointment in senior positions at research centres.

  • The paradoxical virtues of primacy in science

    The question of “Who found it first?” in science is deceptively straightforward. It is largely due to the rewards reserved by those who administer science – funding the ‘right’ people working in the ‘right’ areas at the ‘right’ time to ensure the field’s progress along paths deemed desirable by the state – that primacy in science has become valuable. Otherwise, and in an ideal world (in which rewards are distributed more equitably, such that the quality of research is rewarded a certain amount that is lower than the inordinate rewards that accrue to some privileged scientists today but greater than that which scholars working on ‘neglected’ topics/ideas receive, without regard for gender, race, ethnicity or caste), discovering something first wouldn’t matter to the enterprise of science, just as it doesn’t mean anything to the object of the discovery itself.

    Primacy is a virtue imposed by the structures of modern science. There is today privilege in being cited as “Subramaniam 2021” or “Srinivasan 2022” in papers, so much so that there is reason to believe many scientific papers are published only so they may cite the work of others and keep expanding this “citation circus”. The more citations there are, the likelier the corresponding scientist is to receive a promotion, a grant, etc. at their institute.

    Across history, the use of such citations has also served to obscure the work of ‘other’ scientists and to attribute a particular finding to a single individual or a group. This typically manifests in one of two forms: by flattening the evolution of a complex discovery by multiple groups of people working around the world, sometimes sharing information with each other, to a single paper authored by one of these groups; or by reinforcing the association of one or some names with particular ideas in the scientific literature, thus overlooking important contributions by less well-known scientists.

    The former is a complex phenomenon that is often motivated by ‘prestigious’ awards, including the Nobel Prizes, limiting themselves to a small group of laureates at a time, as well as by the meagre availability of grants for advanced research. Scientists and, especially, the institutes at which they work engage as a result in vociferous media campaigns when an important discovery is at hand, to ensure that opportunities for profit that may arise out of the finding may rest with them alone. This said, it can also be the product of lazy citations, in which scientists cite their friends or peers they like or wish to impress, or collections of papers over the appropriate individual ones, instead of conducting a more exhaustive literature review to cite everyone involved everywhere.

    The second variety of improper citations is of course one that has dogged India – and one with which anyone working with or alongside science in India must be familiar. It has also been most famously illustrated by instances of women scientists who were subsequently overlooked for Nobel Prizes that were awarded to the men who worked with them, often against them. (The Nobel Prizes are false gods and we must tear them down; but for their flaws, they remain good, if also absurdly selective, markers of notable scientific work: that is, no prize has thus far been awarded to work that didn’t deserve it.) The stories of Chien-Shiung Wu, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind.

    But also consider the Indian example of Meghnad Saha’s paper about selective radiation pressure (in the field of stellar astrophysics), which predated Irving Langmuir’s paper on the same topic by three years. Saha lost out on the laurels by not being able to afford having his paper published in a more popular journal and had to settle for one with “no circulation worth mentioning” (source). An equation in this theory is today known as the Saha-Langmuir equation, but even this wouldn’t be so without the conscious effort of some scholars to highlight Saha’s work and unravel the circumstances that forced him into the shadows.

    I discovered recently that comparable, yet not similar, circumstances had befallen Bibhas De, when the journal Icarus rejected a paper he had submitted twice. The first time, his paper presented his calculations predicting that the planet Uranus had rings; the second time was five years later, shortly after astronomers had found that Uranus indeed had rings. Stephen Brush and Ariel Segal wrote in their 2015 book, “Although he did succeed in getting his paper published in another journal, he rarely gets any credit for this achievement.”

    In both these examples, and many others like them, scientists’ attempts to formalise their successes by having their claims detailed in the literature were mediated by scientific journals – whose editors’ descisions had nothing to do with science (costs in the former case and who-knows-what in the latter).

    At the same time, because of these two issues, flattening and reinforcing, attribution for primacy is paradoxically more relevant: if used right, it can help reverse these problems, these imprints of colonialism and imperialism in the scientific literature. ‘Right’ here means, to me at least, that everyone is credited or none at all, as an honest reflection of the fact that good science has never been vouchsafed to the Americans or the Europeans. But then this requires more problems to be solved, such as, say, replacing profit-based scientific publishing (and the consequent valorisation of sensational results) with a ‘global scientific record’ managed by the world’s governments through an international treaty.

    Axiomatically, perhaps the biggest problem with primacy today is its entrenchment. I’m certain humanities and social science scholars have debated this thoroughly – the choice for the oppressed and the marginalised between beating their oppressors at their own game or transcending the game itself. Obviously the latter seems more englightened, but it is also more labour-intensive, labour that can’t be asked freely of them – our scientists and students who are already fighting to find or keep their places in the community of their peers. Then again, beating them at their own game may not be so easy either.

    I was prompted to write this post, in fact, after I stumbled on four seemingly innocuous words in a Wikipedia article about stellarators. (I wrote about these nuclear-fusion devices yesterday in the context of a study about solving an overheating problem.) The article reads that when a solenoid – a coiled wire – is bent around to form a loop, the inner perimeter of the loop has a higher density of wire than the outer perimeter. Surely this is obvious, yet the Wikpedia article phrases it thus (emphasis added):

    But, as Fermi pointed out, when the solenoid is bent into a ring, the electrical windings would be closer together on the inside than the outside.

    Why does a common-sensical claim, which should strike anyone who can visualise or even see a solenoid made into a loop, be attributed to the celebrated Italian physicist Enrico Fermi? The rest of the paragraph to which this sentence belongs goes on to describe how this winding density affects nuclear fusion reactors; it is an arguably straightforward effect, far removed from the singularity and the sophistication of other claims whose origins continue to be mis- or dis-attributed. Wikipedia articles are also not scientific papers. But taken together, the attribution to Fermi contains the footprints of the fact that he, as part of the Knabenphysik of quantum mechanics, worked on many areas of physics, allowing him to attach his name to a variety of concepts at a time when studies on the same topics were only just catching on in other parts of the world – a body of work enabled, as is usual, by war, conquest and the quest for hegemony.

    Maybe fighting over primacy is the tax we must pay today for allowing this to happen.