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03 May 2006 Robert P Crease

In a special readers' poll Robert P Crease seeks your nominations for the most interesting paper of all time

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As a literary genre, scientific papers have long been regarded with suspicion, mainly because of their alleged duplicity. As the biologist Peter Medawar provocatively wrote in his 1967 book The Art of the Soluble, they “not only conceal but actively misrepresent the reasoning that goes into the work they describe”. Despite what scientists might like to think, research papers do not to paint a transparent picture of their work, but strive to justify and defend the result. The late physicist John Ziman went even further, remarking in An Introduction to Science Studies that “a scientific paper is a pious ‘fraud’ “. In his view, papers omit the emotional and intellectual motivations of the work that they describe. Instead, they rhetorically emphasize objectivity and disinterestedness.

But such indictments assume that scientific papers aim to provide a transparent picture of a piece of science. They do not. That job is for historians or, if the participants want to try their hands, for magazine articles, memoirs and after-dinner speeches. Scientific papers have a different goal: to inspire confidence in readers. To this extent, a scientific paper is more like a trial lawyer’s concluding speech, recapitulating the argument – not the proceedings – in summary form and in the strongest way possible.

Gaining admiration

Scientific papers are, however, gaining new respect. In January, the multi-authored science blog Cosmic Variance invited readers to vote for the greatest scientific paper (see cosmicvariance.com). The winner – Newton’s Principia – was counted as a paper despite its hundreds of pages, showing how diverse the genre is. The blog’s thread was interesting, for the participants had very different ideas about the greatness of scientific papers. The debate also inspired the contributors to read original papers, rather than digests and summaries, and to familiarize themselves with science history.

And in his new book The Discoveries, the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman presents his list of the 25 greatest papers of the 20th century. Writing in the introduction, Lightman notes that scientific papers “have their internal rhythms, their images, their beautiful crystallizations, their sometimes fleeting truths”. Still, I think he goes too far in calling such papers “works of art”, because they do not call attention to themselves but to something other than themselves. They stake a claim, and the stake itself is less important than what it claims. As Ziman noted, “anyone who would now set out to refute relativity theory could not succeed by, say, demonstrating a logical fallacy in Einstein’s original paper”.

In various talks and articles, Lightman has attempted to develop what he calls a taxonomy of scientific discovery, classifying papers according to the nature of the discovery. The taxonomy includes “the accident”, or serendipitous encounter, such as Fleming’s discovery of penicillin; “principles first”, when a discovery arises from pursuing a principle’s consequences (Einstein’s 1905 special-relativity paper); “principles last”, when solving a problem produces new principles (Planck’s idea of the quantum); and the “timely clue”, in which an important piece of the puzzle drops into place (Bohr encountering Balmer’s formula for the spectral lines).

Lightman’s taxonomy also includes “analogy”, or the understanding of the unfamiliar from the familiar; the “mathematical imperative”, in which sheer consistency demands something new (Dirac’s equation and the positron); and “new tools”, in which availability of tools makes a discovery possible (Hubble’s use of the 100 inch telescope to find that the universe is expanding). Finally, there is the “long haul”, or dogged work on a problem (Perutz and haemoglobin).

Afterthoughts, puzzles and crazy ideas

Lightman’s classifications are not exhaustive, and I can think of several more.

One is the stunning afterthought. Consider Einstein’s three-page paper of 1905 “Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?”, which he wrote after completing his first paper on special relativity. It describes for the first time the relationship between mass and energy, although Einstein disingenuously called the paper an “amusing and seductive” implication, fearing that “for all I know, God Almighty might be laughing at the whole matter and might have been leading me around by the nose”. The paper draws a consequence logically implicit in the previous paper and could have been the latter’s final section. If it had, as science historian John Rigden has written, “it would have made a spectacular conclusion”.

Another type of paper is the crazy idea such as the one-paragraph article of 1899 by the Irish physicist George FitzGerald. Containing five sentences and no equations, it stated that “almost the only hypothesis” that can reconcile the Michelson and Morley experiment with the systems of Maxwell and Newton “is that the length of material bodies changes, according as they are moving through the ether or against it by an amount depending on the square of the ratio of their velocities to that of light”. The letter was overlooked by nearly everyone at the time – including its author, who was apparently unaware it was even published.

Yet another category is the discordant paper, the authors of which admit puzzlement. An example is Hahn and Strassmann’s 1938 article on neutron irradiation of uranium. They realized that the irradiation appeared to be producing lighter elements, but they wrote that “as chemists…we cannot yet bring ourselves to such a drastic step”. As they commented in an early draft of the paper, this conclusion was “contrary to all previous laws of physics”. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch felt no such compunction and the paper led them to conceive the idea of fission.

The critical point

Sometimes, in short, papers are interesting regardless of whether their content is significant or insignificant, or even true or false. What about Murray Gell-Mann’s first brief on quarks, so hesitant that it asked experimenters “to reassure us of [their] non-existence”? Or the confident, even arrogant, 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper suggesting that quantum mechanics lacks a “reasonable definition of reality”.

I invite you to send me a shortlist of your favourite examples of such interesting scientific papers, stating what makes them interesting. Entries should be e-mailed to the address below. I shall report on the results in a future column.

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