Science advances through collaborative effort, not isolated geniuses
Evidence
While the role of individuals is often highlighted in accounts of the history of science, real science is a collaborative effort in which individual actors make only tiny contributions to the overall picture: the medical study database PubMed lists more than 86,000 articles, mostly with multiple authors, on research into COVID-19 in 2020 alone. At CERN, sometimes several thousand scientists work on the development of a single experiment. Even the theory of relativity, as firmly linked as it is with the name Einstein, was anything but the achievement of a single person. â Holm Gero HĂŒmmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 747
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the âscience is greater than any one of usâ theme in the following paragraph and to the authorâs deconstruction of genius-myth accounts of science. â connects to: Most innovations emerge from parallel developments and collective histories â Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,âŠ, 681; Scientific communities are prestige struggles over attention â Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 13; Stigler built a coordinated research network reaching into biomedical science â Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 156 (+1 more)
Related
- Scientific discoveries emerge from communal slow accumulation, not lone genius (similarity 0.83)
- Scienceâs trustworthiness rests on being intersubjective and collective (similarity 0.80)
- Most innovations emerge from parallel developments and collective histories (similarity 0.80)
- Scientific communities are prestige struggles over attention (similarity 0.79)