+ Problem Solved
A scientist's role in a scientific community
by Casey Rentz
[published in The Skeleton News, Issue 2, October 2006]
The theoretical mathematics community asserts a 100-year weight has been lifted as a result of one man’s suggestion.
In 2003, Dr. Grigory Perelman posted a few short papers, hints at a way to finally prove the Poincare conjecture. Extending the radical work of Henri Poincare nearly a century earlier, Perelman outlined a way to solidify indoctrined thoughts concerning the shape of space. He proved that any 3-dimensional shape without holes is essentially a sphere.
Simple. And then he disappeared.
As collegues scurry around his elegant proposal, daunted by its abilty to tie down decades of their own work, Perelman lays in the Russian woods. He refuses their communications, he refuses the media. He even refuses to accept the prestigious Fields medal awarde to him this fall.
One could speculate he is an ordinary shut-in: he works best in isolation. Atypical of a modern scientist, Perelman did not offer any fellow mathematician knowledge that he was even working on the Poincare problem, nor that he was approaching success at its proof.
No one claims any misdead in his solitude. In fact, his long time lack of communication could have contributed greatly to his ability to unite two areas of mathematics. (He friendlies problem singularities that arise from Ricci flow diagrams, uniting topology with areas of physics.)
Friends verify that he means no disrespect in his refusals; interestingly, they say his solitude pays tribute to the fact that he is opposed to idolatry's command of modern scientific communities. Of course, he will not speak on the subject of idolatry either.
But if he were to come forward, one could imagine he might acknowledge idol worship as particularly dangerous in scientific spheres. Because what scientists conclude is often taken to be a kind of truth. Pinched off like singularities of a system, popular scientists lead in the writing of history. The larger grows the rift between them and the lay public, the more quickly their ideas concrete as truth. This cultural phenomenon seems to conflict with the fundamental purpose scientific inquiry: to have a fluid model of the universe, always open to further interpretation or corrective discovery.
For decades, the peer review process has been championed as the effective check on scientific activity, making sure these truths, however quick we are to take to them, are at least well justified. Due to the recent rash of false manuscripts and doctored research in the U.S. and Britain, scientific communities' faith in the peer review process is diminishing.
It has always been the individual scientist's responsibility to retain moral standards of reporting to the public. This ensures that concrete ideas and theories that become laws are an accurate reflection of what modern science considers a physical truth.
And now that subjects such as Perelman's proof, string theory, and stem cell experimentation have retained the public eye, scientists may have another variable to consider. In the interest of truth (in the face of pop culture), it may be their responsibility not to further the dangerous divide that Dr. Grigory Perelman and others have brought to our attention.
