The last week reminds me of the story of Bardeen & Brattain's invention of the transistor (e.g. in The Idea Factory). It barely worked and heaven forbid you bump the table. There was even a third slighted figure who wanted credit. Part of me wants to be skeptical but OTOH if it's hard to reproduce that seems totally normal. How exciting that some other people have got it working now.
Things also tend to be invented at about the same time at different places. I wonder if there are other people who were this close to invent it but just couldn't get it right.
Last year I read The Double Helix and The Code Breaker within a few months of each other, and what really stood out to me is that while we celebrate the first person who discovers something, in reality there were several teams all racing to the finish line, and were sometimes days or only even hours behind in presenting their findings. Yet only one team gets the accolades and their names in textbooks, the others are a mere footnote at best.
This was my first time reading about the history of discoveries like this, and I guess prior I thought these celebrated names had moved humanity forward by decades if not centuries by connecting the dots of the runes of the universe, but the reality is really very different.
Another example that might be of interest is the use of neural networks in Monte Carlo Tree Search. In 2017 there were two papers published showing how effective the combination of NN’s and MCTS are for planning in board games.
One is an algorithm called ExIT published by Anthony et al, it showed excellent performance on a somewhat obscure board game called Hex. The authors using a typical academic lab setup to achieve this. It has a very impressive 300ish citations.
The other paper is AlphaGo, which has about 10k citations and a Netflix documentary. There are some algorithmic differences that probably make AlphaGo strictly better than ExIT but the big difference seems to mostly be that one group had like a thousand GPUs for a month.
It's even more stark when you come to realize how big the pyramid is just under a new scientific breakthrough. But there are also examples of people that stayed the course against common wisdom (and sometimes while being derided) who eventually succeeded in what they were doing. This is to me the kind of science that is most deserving of prizes, to encourage others to keep looking even when the answers are far from obvious.
I feel that way about string theory. I am merely an airmchair physicist, though I did have a physics minor in college, but it just feels... wrong. Ever more layers of complexity to explain away holes, and no real predictive power. But at least as of ~10-15 (and maybe still today, I have lost touch with that world) years ago, saying this in any serious setting would not make you any friends, nor get you any funding. It feels to me that we have likely squandered decades of brain power going down that hole.
I hope there are still those toiling away doing unpopular work, that can make a breakthrough....
I'm far outside of these social circles nowadays, but I stumbled across this youtube video of a phd candidate talking about string theory recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E), and it seemed to imply that the pendulum in those social circles is swinging back again.
Two independent research groups, one from Japan and one from the US, simultaneously published their discovery of the NdFeB magnet in the same issue of the same journal.
I don't know this particular story, but — FWIW — it's common for different teams working in the same field to be aware of each other's manuscripts and impending submissions. When two teams are about to submit papers with the same discovery, they'll often work with an editor to put it in the same journal issue.
By coordinating a simultaneous publication they can get extra publicity for the discovery, both get the first-mover advantage in citations (both papers get cited by everyone), and also get breathing room to be fully rigorous and write the best possible paper.
Quite similar is Darwin and Wallace presenting their evolutionary theories together. Darwin had been working on his for much longer, but spurred by the possibility of losing priority, he presented Origin of Species as a book rather than waiting for formal review + journal publication.
Yeah, looks like it works that way mostly - based on the examples written up in "How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time" by M Ridley (https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Innovation-Works-Matt-Ridley/dp...). Having done some R&D myself I tend to think of re-search as "repeated search for something that works" these days. Luck (or lack of) plays a big role too, the circumstances and the personalities of the actors involved likewise. Another book on a similar theme (but for medicine specifically) that I really enjoyed reading is "Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the Twentieth Century" by MA Mayers (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Happy-Accidents-Serendipity-Breakth...).
Apparently the theory behind LK-99 was inspired by the studies from Eastern European scientists. However, after the Soviet collapse, the study was lost.
The twitter thread linked below says that it was an independent discovery and the Korean professor was not aware of the prior knowledge until after the discovery, so it's not inspired as much as parallel development.
Cheeky, but isn't nationalism/patriotism just rational self interest? Why wouldn't I want the system I pay taxes into to put me and other people in this boat first?
I like this definition, personally:
“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.”
― Mark Twain
It is rational self interest, but self interest beyond a point is selfish, which is generally considered a negative personality trait.
If you want to put it in game theory perspective, normalizing selfish behavior means that when you could benefit from something in another country but won’t you’ll be the one suffering discrimination.
If we can reach agreements international cooperation can benefit all parties better than the greedy solution.
Funny enough Bardeen went on to work out the theory of conventional superconductivity later (with two other researchers) and got another Nobel prize out of it. What's your issue with Shockley btw?
Nobody can pick fights with Shockley any more (he's dead) - but Shockley is almost a household name, and Bardeen/Brattain's aren't. It's worth trying to adjust the record, both because Shockley was an abusive jerk and because he gets more credit than is due for the transistor.
(I'm not denying that Shockley was brilliant and effective.)
