Does the scientific community, including, of course, Research Gate, place greater value on scientific research published with multiple authors? Did great achievers, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein work alone and independently, or were they simply at the right place at the right moment in the history of science such that they were able to make their contributions to human knowledge because they managed to crystallize the research findings of the predecessors, colleagues, and team-mates? This trend toward collective team participation in research runs counter to the pattern of individual accomplishments in the world of literature, music, and the arts. How do you account for this seeming polarity and what consequences follow from it?
Newton's achievements have come under suspicion because of similar earlier Islamic discoveries but the mathematics remain his whether or not he first visualised gravity. Einstein built on work recently done but his ability to take necessary steps alone remains exceptional and suggests immense character as well as innate ability. Da Vinci was known as much for his additions to warfare and as remarkable as his art was and is, there were better artists. He made a few conspicuous innovations in background, arrangement but others constructed finer works emphasising colour. His science is better than people realise and was and is not simply a matter of unworkable inventions.
I am naturally suspicious of teams, and believe that crucial invention is unlikely through this method, mistakes more easily made, ideologies to be embedded in notions of science. Managers, time scales and bureaucratic direction. Teams succeeded in the construction of nuclear weapons not in revelatory perspectives.
It's a good question. Theoretical research is usually a quite individual effort, and continues to be so through the dust of the centuries. Today's experimentation in many scientific fields and industries are rarely possible for a single experimenter. Obviously, in many cases a team is needed for a verity of clear reasons. The key question is as to whether all team members are eventually co-authors, in the essence has as far as I'm concerned a logical answer - a big NO. However, sciences / industries organizational structures, budgeting, politics, traditions, and habits aren't commensurate with necessary reality changes. Numerous application engineers specializing in various complex equipment / software / specimen preparation/ radiation safety, etc. should have their own, independent of eventual research results, career paths, wages, awards, and honorable treatments. Your medical doctor, who, for instance, prescribed a patient to do X rays, endoscopy, tomography, EKG, etc. is the sole doctor responsible for the patient's health, and the course of healing. All other ones are just each subfield's responsible specialists. I believe, something similar makes sense in sciences as well. Integrated circuits chip design and manufacturing projects often count hundreds of people involved into a project of creating a single CPU. Three people are personally responsible and recognized for the eventual results - the overall project manager, the key chip architect, and the main production manager / technologist, despite the fact of numerous other groups, labs, services, and workers being deeply professionally involved. In a case of a failure, those people keep the heaviest burden of failure. The rest of the team with some inevitable losses is reconfigured to other projects. A successful outcome of the project brings honor and recognition to the entire team, while the listed above key people get a lion share of recognition. Note, in the examples above there are no equal right co-authors. What is so obvious in medicine, and high tech industries - should be studied and used to some extent in sciences as well.
Nancy Ann Watanabe
Thank you for sharing this question.
There is no major difference between art and science when you consider the aspect of creativity.
In my general perception, the ultimate example of the balance between art and science is Leonardo's famous Codex Atlanticus which until today is the unequaled example of the greatest ability to observe, create visual description and report the most complex relationships of the surrounding world. In order to fully appreciate this work, please visit
https://artsandculture.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/ten-key-facts-about-leonardo-da-vinci-s-codex-atlanticus/rwKy3jZHwWiyJA
The Codex shows that the two fields are not very different and that individual genius is still a determining factor.
The other examples are available from many sources, we can consider for example the following list
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-10-greatest-scientists-of-all-time
On the other hand, even the most prominent and talented scientists are part of the teams, despite the significant separation of their members (both in time and space).
The matter of teamwork and allocation of responsibilities is a matter of concern. Alexander Fleming is in the history books as the discoverer of penicillin but in fact was the head of a large team (apart from the fact that the processes were known in much earlier cultures) and in the 1920s and later it was common for heads of labs to be given sole credit. Seniority and class meant more then than originality.
I referenced a few months ago that the early archaeology of Sutton Hoo, an important horde of Anglo-Saxon treasure and artifacts, was achieved by a local labourer, Basil Brown, who, although not formally educated was highly intelligent and had already done excellent work for the nearby Ipswich Museum. As a skilled amateur archaeologist, he made accurate judgements and began scientific data. When the larger museums got involved, Charles Philips of Cambridge University took over the dig, and Brown was instantly demoted with Philips name attached to the discovery. This was the situation until recently. Class counted.
The importance of team work in science and industry is required to achieve successful outcomes. Recognition of the team work is also important as well as those who contributed in the project. Art work tends to be more individualistic, but can part of team work.
The simple fact is this - complex problems require teamwork if solutions are to be found speedily.
Look at the vaccine for coronavirus. Many teams are racing against time to come out with the vaccine. In tjis modern age, teamwork is necessity, not an option.
Dear Nancy,
WHAT a thought provoking question. There are a few geniuses who bridged both the scientific and arts communities. By and large though, I think that the Sciences because they want to recreate "lightening in a bottle" have a more teamwork approach, whereas art is the creator's own vision. That is not to say that writers especially do not get editorial assistance. Even with critiques though, the artist's mind must interpret it.
brigid
The unique approach to prioritizing teamwork was proposed by Nicholas Bourbaki, a famous mathematician who never existed. Details are described in the excellent book: "Bourbaki, A Secret Society of Mathematicians"
https://www.ams.org/notices/200709/tx070901150p.pdf
When we read articles with multiple authors, we should be reminded of this ingenious idea from the past, maybe this will show a likely way to credit teamwork in the future?
The entire story of Nicolas Bourbaki is covered quite nicely in the following article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
Dear Dr. Janusz Pudykiewicz ,
To find / create an anonymous team of similar to Bourbaki high caliber creativity people, who are also united in their altruistic strive to enrich sciences seems like an extremely rare event. Mathematics is a unique and exceptional field requiring a gift of synthesis and combination in the areas of logic and imagination. There's no another scientific field that is so small in its material requirements to do the job, and so rich and meaningful in the products produced.
Dear Dr. Len Leonid Mizrah ,
Thank you for your excellent comment, it is extremely relevant in our time. To paraphrase your words, we need many teams of creative people “who are also united in their altruistic strive to enrich sciences”. The current situation we are experiencing with the novel coronavirus 2 is the best example of why we need it, however, I agree with you that it is very difficult.
Depends on the artistic endeavour in question. Much of R Keith Sawyer's work on creativity has debunked the persistent myth of the lone artistic genius. Such persons (usually white males) have certainly existed in the past (Leonardo comes to mind), but Sawyer argues that in fact in present times such artists work in teams. Consider a soloist (classical piano), for argument's sake. While their performance involves a single person's artistic skills on display, in fact there is a hidden network of agents, promoters, and so on that support this performance. Theatre and other types of music very often involve team performance: a typical jazz ensemble draws from the collective contributions and field-knowledge of at least two players and in this field trios, quartets, and larger assemblages often are the case. For fascinating insights into the hidden networks that operate in music, see Christopher Small's Musicking.
The process of creation in art and science will remain in the sphere of mystery in the same way as the forces driving human deeds (despite of many attempts to provide some "mechanistic" explanations). The person and genius of Leonardo da Vinci is particularly relevant in the context of this discussion, especially when we consider the recent research performed by Angelo Paratico, indicating that the famous artist was a Chinese scholar lost in the Renaissance Italy. For more details please visit the following site
http://www.lascarpublishing.com/leonardo/
This finding explains the missing link that was always intriguing after my detailed studies of the creativity of the most famous Renaissance men.
“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”
Leonardo da Vinci
Wolfgang F. Schwarz
,Good question (" Do you mean "art" as works of art or did you have in mind the "arts" in the sense of "Liberal Arts" (from "artes liberales") = Humanities? ") nine hours ago. I was thinking of Arts and Sciences in the academic sense, to include not only art per se, but also languages, literatures, music, philosophy, and similar fields of study for Arts, and chemistry, physics, geological sciences, biological sciences, genetics, mathematics, and similar fields of study for Sciences. Hybrid fields of study in the social sciences try to apply scientific methodologies in studying humanistic endeavors, say, in political science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, history, economics, and geography.
These are somewhat arbitrary and general rubrics. For example, languages and literatures lean toward humanities, while linguistics tends toward science. Literature at the exalted level of art reserves a special status for works of literary art so that poets and novelists have traditionally occupied a higher echelon than literary critics both inside of the academic world and outside of it. For example, J. Hillis Miller caused a lot of raised eyebrows when he put forward the view that the creative text and the critical text are engaged in a deconstructive relationship that is analogous to host and guest in quasi biological terms, whereby one is either a parasite or a victim, predator or prey. Thus, in my view, literary criticism has increasingly encroached on the sacrosanct territory of imaginative literature and developed a canon, a significant body of articles and books in which scientism yokes together with imagination, to the point of challenging the traditional subject (novel, poem, play) in making it the object.
This modern and postmodern trend is in marked contrast to the literary theory of Aristotle, in that the moderns lay claim not only to quasi scientific acumen but also to inventive thinking, ingenuity, and imagination. There is an art and a science of modern literary criticism that is alien to Aristotelian classification, enumeration, exemplification, and reasoned analytical contemplation of forms, genres, and types. In a similar fashion, postmodern literary history, criticism, and theory breaks out of the mold of Western literary tradition. T.S. Eliot, winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, was recognized for his poetry and criticism. HIs long poem _The Waste Land_ (1922) marks the apex of the modern period, and moreover, was influenced by South Asian and East Asian literary and cultural traditions. William Butler Yeats also extended the reach of Western poetic forms to Asia, including the Middle East, and, analogous to Albert Einstein, ventured to envision in the sun and moon imagery hidden scientific and mathematical convergences with poetic evocation and history, both human and cosmic.
Yesterday was the birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche (b. October 15, 1844; d. August 25, 1900), who is often mentioned as the most influential modern author because when his fictional persona Zarathustra announced the death of God, he did so in the context of the ancient Greek ideal of humanism. I would say that, if God made Man in His Image, then Nietzsche announced the inception of the Image, i.e., Man, being called to action to create his future, the future of Mankind. As Edgar Allan Poe asserts in _Eureka_: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe: A Poem (1851), the universe as "a plot of God," and therefore, twenty-first century Man is an archetypal literary critic, knowledgeable in both Arts and Sciences.
Thanks again for your inquiry.
Sincerely,
Nancy Ann Watanabe
It depends on what you mean by "art"; if you mean works of art then it is true but if you mean academic work in arts and humanities it would be false as teamwork can be well used in both arts and sciences.
Science has always been a "team work": when , e.g., I am working on the sysytematic revision of the genus Cyphogastra, I use specimens collected by others, computer made and programmed by still others, &c., but - most importantly - I base my work on achievements of many predecessors from Aristotle through Darwin and Mayr to still active Colleagues: already Newton admitted: „If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants”!
However, team work (co-operation, making use of other's advice and/or productions) is not the same as "team publication" (co-authorship): spreading of such false equation is a relatively very recent phenomenon, provoked by pression on "rat races", "publish [in so-called 'renowned' or 'top' journals] or perish", &c., what forces scientists to artificially inflate their number of publications (I invite you as "co-author" of my work, you invites me as "co-author" of yours, and each of us, having really writtern one paper has two items in publication list!).
Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein didn't work alone at all! This false impression has to do with the way that the history of science were told over time.
Ana: And who claimed that they worked alone? Science has always been a "team work", nobody can work alone, it is simply impossible! But "team work", cooperation, can be - and frequently is - done on various, not always "formalized', ways, sometimes (indeed: usually!) even so that "members of the team" are not aware of having participated!
Dear Roman Bohdan Hołyński
That is an interesting thought, especially if you consider another person's work as an encouragement or goad. As with Newton's apple, an unrelated subject can inspire a new way to look at a problem and lead to a solution.
A salt-coated mask that kills viruses? Alberta researchers working on it | CTV News
The above link seems so simple-salt kills many bacteria but who would have thought to somehow impregnate a mask with it? A potentially low budget dream fix?
Take care all, stay safe,
brigid
The discussion topic reminds me of Alex Issigonis, the car designer who brought to us the Mini. He is also famous for the quote "A camel is a horse designed by a committee". In a related vein, Simone Elkeles once said “Opinions are like 4rseholes, everybody’s got one”.
Dear Brigid Conroy ,
I agree with your observation about it being a surprise to learn that salt may have an impact on protective measures against being infected by a virus. In this regard, I have been observing a "team player" effect in advertisements issued by various different manufacturers and retailers selling protective face masks that contain copper threads. It seems that copper in protective facial masks worn to prevent infection from the novel COVID-19 virus provides a stronger barrier against the disease. I am wondering if health care providers have encountered utilization of copper as a preventive or a curative ingredient in any medical treatments that improve the quality of life for their patients? Very best regards and good wishes.
Dear Prof. Nancy Ann Watanabe and Readers,
The antivirial properties of copper arę well known as indicated by numerous researchers. Please consider a study available on the Research Gate:
”The virucidal activity of copper was determined in vitro by exposure of the virus to copper”
Article Sars-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Inactivation Capability of Copper-Coat...
This example demonstrates the importance of collaboration between scientists from different fields in solving the “enigma” of this virus.
For more information please use a Google search with the following keywords:
is copper a protective measure against coronavirus
One of the most relevant entries is
Article Is Copper beneficial for COVID-19 patients? Is Copper benefi...
Dear Janusz Pudykiewicz ,
I thank you very much for contributing such an excellent example of the use of copper !
Without team including scientists from science, economics, social sciences, technical expert including a good communicator scientific solutions are not complete and so do the team is.
Science Communication is a major need of the hour
https://twitter.com/ProfGaganMatta
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-00645-1?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Thank you Nancy Ann Watanabe
Nobody denies the importance of having teamwork skills, as they are a fundamental key to success in most areas of life and work. However, teamwork is a challenge in itself. And it requires great effort to be achieved. I believe collective action is required in all science and artistic fields.
Gagan Matta ,
Thank you for your answer to this Research Gate discussion. I strongly agree with your view that, especially in our contemporary world, team work is crucial, and should include experts in "science, ecoomics, social sciences, technical" fields who also possess the ability to communicate their findings. As you observe, "Science Communication is a majorneed of the hour"! Best regards.
Antethar Jabar ,
Thank you very much for contributing your thoughtful answer to this Research Gate discussion. As you observe, "teamwork is a challenge in itself. And it requires great effort to be achieved. I believe collective action is required in all science and artistic fields." It would be interesting to combine the expertise of scientists and artists during this unprecedented novel Covid-19 pandemic. But medical science, the media, and actuarial specialists are holding the world stage.
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