© Science Admins

 

The essential task of science is to explore the unknown. Pretty much by definition, this is the most difficult of tasks to organize, since new discoveries always occur outside of all existing organizational schemes. So science generally makes progress by the isolated efforts of extraordinary people. Unfortunately, it isn't uncommon for two or more fringe scientists to be working on the same problem, using the same techniques, without even realizing it. (Newton & Leibnitz both developed calculus, while Darwin & Wallace both developed the theory of evolution, in complete isolation.) We'd get a lot more value if people like that could trade notes.

 

In the more established branches of science, the funding and educational structures provide the framework for coordinating the efforts of people all over the world. The benefits of collaboration are so enormous that this gives established science a huge advantage. If you put your money into well understood topics, where the efforts are well organized, you get a greater return on investment than if you throw it into fringe endeavors being conducted by independent investigators who don't even talk to each other. Yet the greatest potential value lies in territory that hasn't been explored yet. So where we stand to gain the most is precisely where we have the least collaboration, and thus the lowest return on investment.

 

We can do better.

 

The idea behind Dynamic Groups (DGs) is to give fringe scientists the benefits of collaborative tools, but without forcing them into any existing organizational scheme, which would stifle the originality — and thus the potential value — of their work. So DGs are organizational units that define themselves, however they like. If they want to identify an entity that nobody else acknowledges (such as a new elementary particle, or form of energy), all they have to do is come up with a name for it, and call themselves the DG that studies that entity. To make their work accessible to others, all they have to do is create and maintain a review paper that summarizes work being done within that field of focus, and cross-link it with related topics maintained by other DGs. Then anybody who starts thinking along the same lines will be able to navigate through the cross-links to find the DG of interest, and start collaborating, instead of floundering in isolation.

 

To make this work, there needs to be a hierarchy of review papers that can be navigated to find the desired field of focus. For example, the DG studying electrons writes a review paper on all of the cutting edge research on electrons. Then they post a link to their review into the next higher level (i.e., more general) review, which might be the paper on Atomic Theory. That paper is summarized in one that identifies all of the theories of matter. And that paper appears in a review of all scientific theories, material or otherwise. Once all of this is set up, somebody interested in electron theory goes to the Scientific Theories Review, then to the theories of matter, then atomic theory, and there finds the DG focusing on electron theory.

 

All of these papers have to be the work of self-assigned DGs, and the way that they review work within their chosen scope will be totally up to them. Thus the treatment that one DG gets in another's review might not necessarily be what it would have wanted. Nevertheless, DGs wanting their review papers to be frequented by other researchers will strive to maintain a comprehensive treatment of related DGs, along with useful descriptions, and this will necessarily include value judgements. But that's not a bad thing — it is not up to somebody writing a review to glorify everything ever done within any particular field of focus, but rather, to show people where to find the good stuff.

 

Still, one scientist's trash is another's treasure, and there needs to be room for alternative interpretations. Thus the Bohr Model DG might consider one paper to be fatally flawed, while the Quantum Mechanics DG might consider the same paper to represent an important advance in our understanding. So we need to leave room for parallel and competing opinions. Then, these differences of opinion simply need to be summarized in a higher-level review. So you pick your approach (e.g., Bohr Model versus Quantum Mechanics), and you read what that DG has to say. If you're curious, you might check how the same topic is treated in a different model.