Critical Mass in Science

In my experience, a lot of program managers in the Federal Government have a view of the development of new ideas in science that they are the result of invention by individuals. It is a view not unlike historical accounts of Edison or other famous inventors who experimented in a lab on a variety of stuff until something they tried worked in some amazing, new way. Certainly, their search space was informed by concepts and beliefs about the nature of the things they were working on, so it wasn't random. Nevertheless, it was individual.

I believe, from my observation of science projects across a broad spectrum of disciplines, that this approach is not just quaint, but fundamentally wrong. Science progresses in large part because it is a social process. Philosophers of science and many others share this view, so this statement is nothing new, except maybe to some government program managers. Beyond this, however, I believe that the search process conducted by scientists working in a specific area is not only not random, i.e., informed by concepts and beliefs about the nature of their area, but it is also not a linear process in which you can increase the chances of discovery in proportion to the number of scientists working in the area.

Scientific progress is influenced by the communication among scientists in a field, by their papers, conference talks, peer reviews of each other, and informal communications. More than that, this communicative feedback induces rapid convergence when progress seems imminent. A research project in a center I once managed was focused on this phenomenon and ways in which it could be detected in networks of scientists. This phenomenon acts like a "social attention" mechanism that rapidly heightens communication among scientists around a specific topic in a manner not unlike the formation of critical mass in a nuclear reactor.

Effective program managers not only pay attention to the social processes of science in making and overseeing government funding for science, but they also get involved in sampling the social network of science for potential critical mass phenomena surrounding potential new discoveries. One of the ways this was done at the National Science Foundation was through funding of workshops in which 25 or more scientists were invited to discuss a particular topic and share concerns and interests. Many, if not most, such workshops were not successful in that a sudden boom of interest occurred, but sometimes they were. Such a process is a sampling process of looking for new areas that, if the Foundation invested some additional funds, a new discovery could be facilitated. The process encourages critical mass to develop in a nascent area, if there are already the concepts and ideas to support it. Without being fueled by such activities, the process might take a lot longer, inhibited by the normal inertia of scientific communication, such as the publication and proposal review process which can take months, if not years.