What do you mean by "serious scientific discussions?" I'm asking you cause we, women and men, trust on science. And science must, very often, be creative most of the time. We need to produce useful things, we need to create new theories all time - if we don't then we cry like little babies.

Read "La Tentation De L'Innocence" (The temptation of Innocence), by Pascal Bruckner. It is about science, XXI century mankind and others.

Marianna, what do you mean by

"We need to produce useful things, we need to create new theories all time - if we don't then we cry like little babies" ?

(Unfortunately I don't read French.)

It seems that you completely misunderstood the question. Please point to any such serious scientific discussion on the general direction of a field?

Lev Goldfarb, I believe this question was pretty well answered by Thomas Kuhn. You must read his great book if you have not already done so. Please do not accept the brief synopses that appear everywhere. To wit: "Normal science" is just about filling in the details. It is only the revolutions that eventually happen which even attempt to account for the inconsistencies and anomalies that abound in most established theories. And, as Planck said, many will not ever give up the old comfortable theories until the simply die off. ----------Regards, James

James, I have Kuhn's book and read it and know very well what Planck said. But we are not talking about pre-internet times, and so we are talking about a different degree of gutlessness, particularly considering the challenges science is facing today. ;--)

Or may be I'm missing something.

Lev my dilemma in these times of "advanced science" is...... what are we as life scientists doing about those forever on-going problems whereby the same questions are asked, same proposals from year-to-year funded and we get the same not-so-helpful results?! For instance the issue of HIV is just silly, proposals on the immune issues, which more often than not are all the same are submitted to funding bodies, the same reviewers who are comfortable with those dinosour ideas approve and fund them! yet till now we cannot answer questions pertaining to discordance!? how about attempting to look at the genetics of the immune system, the virus and the human in relation to the pathogenicity of HIV? To cut a long story short, we as scientists have become comfortable with the little we know and have no need to think out of the box! it is a sad state of affairs especially in the developing world where new ideas or thought processes are an anathema

I agree you dear Lev Goldfarb. Scientific communities may be transforming into closed community in the name of creating opened society. Internet is one of the means to show real face of scientists. This applies to most scientific communications as well at least to me. If people want to preserve their knowledge into themselves then why do these media and open societies necessity?

The question by Lev Goldfarb about "the lack of serious scientific discussions" from the internet is a very real issue. The internet is turning to a giant forest of the same trees. New findings are becoming scarce except on the commercial sites where you may buy them. Even then you buy products of ideas not new ideas at all.

This days, ideas became marketable and they may not appear on the net. There are fewer high level works that are published than that are not published. My question, like Lev Goldfarb is: "are scientists free to discuss their ideas freely on the net since most top scientists seem to be hired by multinational corporations, or governments"?

Esther:

To answer your concerns, as I have repeatedly mentioned elsewhere, we have a historically unprecedented situation in science (and also in economic and social spheres). This is related to the combination of three circumstances. The most important are the following two: the unprecedented need to move to a new scientific 'language' (see http://www.cs.unb.ca/~goldfarb/BOOK.pdf ) and the overspecialization of scientists. The third one has to do with the busy patterns of our daily lives.

This combination is extremely 'poisonous' to our present scientific needs. Large corporations and, more importantly, funding agencies do not realize this situation and are under the pressure from various 'players'.

There are simple steps to alleviate the unprecedented transitional situation in science, including setting up of several scientific journals addressing the new, radical, proposals in various sciences and setting aside 1% --3% of the funding budgets to support promising radical ideas. Some of this funding can go for the support of yearly conferences specifically addressing new directions.

The present agencies and journals, evolved for the needs of "normal" science, are not equipped to deal with this unprecedented transitional needs.

Habte:

"are scientists free to discuss their ideas freely on the net since most top scientists seem to be hired by multinational corporations, or governments?"

By far, not all top scientists are hired by the multinational corporations, and, in general this is not the main reason. There is nothing that prevents "top scientists" to discuss at the conferences or on the internet the *general* new directions in their science, except the lack of interesting ideas. ;--)

The most obvious 'internet opportunity' in our context is that people not knowing too much about natural science can offer their thoughts to a community of considerable size. That given, it is probably reasonable to assume that 1/10 of the contributions come from people who know the basics of what they are speaking about. Assuming that 1/5 of those thought seriously about what they are writing one gets roughly the fraction of serious scientific discussions that I observed in my fields at RG. I see no need to assume a 'transitional nature of our scientific period' to understand this.

Ulrich,

Can you point to at least 2 serious scientific discussion on the internet about the direction of science with the participation of prominent scientists, anywhere at all?

No, not with the participation of pominent scientists. These have their audience already and don't need the internet community.

Ulrich, we are talking about an unprecedented transitional period in science (sorry if you don't sense it), outcome of which no one knows. What would prevent prominent scientists from participating in some serious scientific debates about the future directions of science?

Mind you, there are some rare exceptions ( http://web.archive.org/web/20080618195657/http://psyche.csse.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-23-penrose.html , except they are in the form of monologues).

Lev, Simply that it is not possible to organize such a debate. By far the largest part of contributions will come from the uninformed.

You know what, I don't quite buy it. From my experience, in a *scientific forum*, many laypersons will yield to prominent scientists and enjoy the ride (most people are not that dumb).

Besides, we are talking about a supposed natural curiosity regarding the coming scientific revolution.

I guess, if one does not sense the unprecedented nature of the our scientific period, then things could be explained as you do: As a leading scientist, why would I bother getting involved in a dubious activity? ;--)

So the key question is: Are we at the threshold of an unprecedented scientific tsunami?