Why everyone should write academic papers?
I love how there was a time when a non-educated person with no degree, experience, privilege or anything else became the first scientist ever. That person simply thought of a hypothesis, created an experiment to test it and then forever believed that hypothesis to be true. What a brute they must have been, standing tall in some green field or a jungle or perhaps as a cliche in some cave, dismantling our entire viewpoint of scientists and how they are supposed to be.
A person more uneducated in science than any person alive, literally just invented science and they didn’t even know it. What a joke!
And hence I believe science should be more simple than it is now.
I don’t know how it escalated so quickly to such complex stuff but being how knowledge grows exponentially, I don’t blame complexity at all. I blame the unnecessary gatekeeping of science. How inaccessible it has become for people to participate in science and to actually contribute to the growth of humanity’s knowledge.
Nowadays if you discover something as a layperson, it’s almost next to impossible to get that idea somewhere in science. And that’s far-fetched because even if you are inside the science world, it’s still pretty difficult to actually get published and be heard by science.
I like what Bill Bryson says about science- “There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally, they credit the wrong person.”
If that is what happens to people inside the science community, imagine the fate of the rest of us.
But there was a time when philosophers would sit back and hypothesize about the world. They would come up with the most ridiculous notions and views about the natural world. Some ideas would end up in alchemy and others in the lab of some scientists trying to rigorously clean the world of bad arguments.
Then elitism came to be and slowly but steadily, people in the science world started to cut off from society. Philosophy became art and art became the opposite of science. So much so that each subject in science became a world in itself. Experts were born and each subject was full of its own experts. But then even the experts started to dwindle.
They lost respect for the notion that anybody can ‘science’ and that knowledge has an inherent distaste for monopoly.
Now only a handful of people in the world would know a topic or subject in its entirety. And common people don’t even have a full understanding of the most basic stuff.
I believe that science should be open. Anybody can come up with a hypothesis and anybody having the resources should be able to test it. And anybody should be able to take that theory in front of the world- to be accepted or at least to be considered.
Hopefully, the future will make science not just accessible like it is now for consumption but also accessible for people to contribute to it.
Philosophers might still be more scientists than artists and amateur scientists may get the same respect or at least the same ears as someone well-established.
Because a future of science in which the knowledge of humanity is controlled by only a few powerful people and organizations would truly be a very bleak future. It completely contradicts the reason why science came to be in the first place. After all, if science was created by a caveman trying to get a fire going just so that their cave can fill with light, the least science could do is to maintain the light for the rest of us.
