Yes. He said that I should be careful about sharing my project because, otherwise, I’ll be reading about it in a journal in a few months. His warning may exaggerate the likelihood of a rival researcher and mis-value the expansion of knowledge, but I’m deferring to him as a concession of my ignorance, especially regarding rules of the academy.
This is heavily context-dependent. Many fields are idea-rich and implementation-poor, in which case you do have to ram ideas down people’s throats, because there’s a glut of other ideas you have to compete against. But in fields that are implementation-rich and idea-poor, ideas should be guarded until you’ve implemented them. There are no doubt academic fields where the latter case applies.
But in fields that are implementation-rich and idea-poor, ideas should be guarded until you’ve implemented them. There are no doubt academic fields where the latter case applies.
I’ve been privately told of several such cases in high-energy physics. Below is an excerpt from the Politzer’s Nobel lecture. He discovered Asymptotic freedom (that quarks are essentially connected by the miniature rubber bands which have no tension when the quarks are close to each other).
I slowly and carefully completed a calculation of the Yang-Mills beta function.
I happen to be ambidextrous and mildly dyslexic. So I have trouble with
left/right, in/out, forward/backward, etc. Hence, I derived each partial result
from scratch, paying special attention to signs and conventions. It did not take
long to go from dismay over the final minus sign (it was indeed useless for
studying low energy phenomena) to excitement over the possibilities. I phoned
Sidney Coleman. He listened patiently and said it was interesting. But, according
to Coleman, I had apparently made an error because David Gross and
his student had completed the same calculation, and they found it was plus.
Coleman seemed to have more faith in the reliability of a team of two, which
included a seasoned theorist, than in a single, young student. I said I’d check
it yet once more. I called again about a week later to say I could find nothing
wrong with my first calculation. Coleman said yes, he knew because the
Princeton team had found a mistake, corrected it, and already submitted a
paper to Physical Review Letters.
He does not explicitly say that Gross was tipped off, but it’s easy to read between the lines. The rest of his lecture, titled The Dilemma Of Attribution is also worth reading.
I cannot speak to your private examples, but I think you may be reading that into what Politzer said. He previously mentions the existence of ‘multiples’:
And the neat, linear progress, as outlined by the sequence of gleaming gems recognized by Nobel Prizes, is a useful fiction. But a fiction it is. The truth is often far more complicated. Of course, there are the oft-told priority disputes, bickering over who is responsible for some particular idea. But those questions are not only often unresolvable, they are often rather meaningless. Genuinely independent discovery is not only possible, it occurs all the time.
And shortly after your passage, he says
On learning of the Gross-Wilczek-Politzer result, [Nobelist] Ken Wilson, who might have thought of its impossibility along the same lines as I attributed to [Nobelist] Schwinger, above, knew who to call to check the result. He realized that there were actually several people around the world who had done the calculation, en passant as it were, as part of their work on radiative corrections to weak interactions in the newly-popular Weinberg-Salam model. They just never thought to focus particularly on this aspect. But they could quickly confirm for Wilson by looking in their notebooks that the claimed result was, indeed, correct....[Nobelist] Steve Weinberg and [Nobelist] Murray Gell-Mann were among those to instantly embrace non-Abelian color SU(3) gauge theory as the theory of the strong interactions. In Gell-Mann’s case, it was in no small part because he had already invented it (!) with Harald Fritzsch and christened it QCD...’d only heard of Gell-Mann and Fritzsch’s work second hand, from [Nobelist] Shelly Glashow, and he seemed think it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I only later realized it was more Glashow’s mode of communication than his serious assessment of the plausibility of the proposal. In any case, I had completely lost track of Gell-Mann and Fritzsch’s QCD.
I cannot speak to your private examples, but I think you may be reading that into what Politzer said.
Not me. This tip-off story had been talked about in the community for a long time, just never publicly until Politzer decided to carefully and tactfully state what he knew personally and avoid speculating on what might have transpired. The result itself, of course, was ripe for discovery, and indeed was discovered but glossed over by others before him. I mentioned this particular story because it’s one of the most famous and most public ones. Of course, it might all be rumors and in reality there was no issue.
‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’. I see here by Politzer’s testimony a multiple discovery of at least 3 (Gell-Mann and the more-than-one persons implied by ‘several’) and you ask me to believe that a fourth multiple is not yet another multiple but rather a plagiarism/theft based, solely on you say it was being talked about. It’s not exactly a convincing case.
The general narrative sounds very similar to cases in my own field, but I’d rather not talk about it. I’ve been cautioned not to speak about my current projects with certain people, on account of this.
David Gross and his student had completed the same calculation, and they found it was plus.
A week after Politzer shared his calculation:
the Princeton team had found a mistake, corrected it, and already submitted a paper to Physical Review Letters.
Why would they decide to redo the calculation (not a very hard one, but rather laborious back then, though it’s a standard one in any grad QFT course now) at exactly the same time?
Anyway, no point in further speculations without new data.
It may be more precise to say there are academic groups to which that description applies, and that discretion is worthwhile in their proximity. Examples of those still living will remain private for obvious reasons.
I’ve been privately told of several such cases in high-energy physics. Some even allege that the main reason that David Gross got a share of the Nobel Prize for Asymptotic Freedom because he was a referee or maybe a journal editor for the Politzer’s paper and managed to hasten his group’s somewhat lagging research to get it published at the same time. No idea if the story has any true in it.
Yes. He said that I should be careful about sharing my project because, otherwise, I’ll be reading about it in a journal in a few months. His warning may exaggerate the likelihood of a rival researcher and mis-value the expansion of knowledge, but I’m deferring to him as a concession of my ignorance, especially regarding rules of the academy.
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”
This is heavily context-dependent. Many fields are idea-rich and implementation-poor, in which case you do have to ram ideas down people’s throats, because there’s a glut of other ideas you have to compete against. But in fields that are implementation-rich and idea-poor, ideas should be guarded until you’ve implemented them. There are no doubt academic fields where the latter case applies.
Can you name any?
I’ve been privately told of several such cases in high-energy physics. Below is an excerpt from the Politzer’s Nobel lecture. He discovered Asymptotic freedom (that quarks are essentially connected by the miniature rubber bands which have no tension when the quarks are close to each other).
He does not explicitly say that Gross was tipped off, but it’s easy to read between the lines. The rest of his lecture, titled The Dilemma Of Attribution is also worth reading.
I cannot speak to your private examples, but I think you may be reading that into what Politzer said. He previously mentions the existence of ‘multiples’:
And shortly after your passage, he says
Not me. This tip-off story had been talked about in the community for a long time, just never publicly until Politzer decided to carefully and tactfully state what he knew personally and avoid speculating on what might have transpired. The result itself, of course, was ripe for discovery, and indeed was discovered but glossed over by others before him. I mentioned this particular story because it’s one of the most famous and most public ones. Of course, it might all be rumors and in reality there was no issue.
‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras’. I see here by Politzer’s testimony a multiple discovery of at least 3 (Gell-Mann and the more-than-one persons implied by ‘several’) and you ask me to believe that a fourth multiple is not yet another multiple but rather a plagiarism/theft based, solely on you say it was being talked about. It’s not exactly a convincing case.
The general narrative sounds very similar to cases in my own field, but I’d rather not talk about it. I’ve been cautioned not to speak about my current projects with certain people, on account of this.
A week after Politzer shared his calculation:
Why would they decide to redo the calculation (not a very hard one, but rather laborious back then, though it’s a standard one in any grad QFT course now) at exactly the same time?
Anyway, no point in further speculations without new data.
It may be more precise to say there are academic groups to which that description applies, and that discretion is worthwhile in their proximity. Examples of those still living will remain private for obvious reasons.
Yup, some specific people steal. This definitely happens (but I will not mention names for obvious reasons).
I’ve been privately told of several such cases in high-energy physics. Some even allege that the main reason that David Gross got a share of the Nobel Prize for Asymptotic Freedom because he was a referee or maybe a journal editor for the Politzer’s paper and managed to hasten his group’s somewhat lagging research to get it published at the same time. No idea if the story has any true in it.