Science and the Internet

Via The Virtual Chase, we learn that scientists at the Fermi and Argonne National Laboratories, along with colleagues from other climes, are designing ways to help the scientific community harness the enormous mass of data that the internet has placed at investigators' potential disposal, if only there were enough time and resources to analyze it all. According to a September 4 article appearing in Tech News World, the scientists plan to build an "international data grid" that would afford worldwide access to terabytes or even petabytes of scientific data, and also to number-crunching resources at the supercomputer level. According to Tech News World, their project is "expected to break the growing stranglehold on scientific breakthroughs now held by countries that can afford to build massive particle accelerators, orbiting telescopes and scientific combines to decipher the human genome." It will lead, says one proponent, to a "democratization of science" -- people doing high-energy physics from Calcutta.

All this may or may not happen, but one issue it raises is whether and to what extent the traditional imprimaturs by which scientific elites confer legitimacy on researchers and their research are (or may become) anachronistic holdovers from the Gutenberg era. If anyone, regardless of educational pedigree and institutional affiliation, can obtain the data, crunch the numbers, and test a pet theory -- if speed-of-light access to information now permits a thousand scientific flowers to bloom, and a hundred schools of thought to contend -- will slower-moving scientific elites lose their status as ultimate arbiters of legitimacy? Or will an unmanageable flood of scientific "information" make them all the more important?