2 Quotes Tagged: peer-review

"In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/464827.Robert_W__Wood" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Robert W. Wood">Robert W. Wood</a> was asked to respond to a toast ... 'To physics and metaphysics.' Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy — truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/464827.Wood" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Wood">Wood</a> took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/464827.Wood" rel="nofollow noopener" title="Wood">Wood</a> concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory."

Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics, Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.