Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The notion that scientists and other scholars constitute a kind of community of scholars has frequently been asserted and discussed ( Godfrey-Smith 2003 ). The “invisible college” of natural philosophers is a seventeenth-century idea ( Price 1963 ). The phrasing is reminiscent of Adam Smith's later “invisible hand,” except that the scientists are real persons and it is only the “colleges” that are sometimes invisible. It stems from Robert Boyle's allusion to the importance to the founding of the Royal Society of Freemasons. An early driving force behind the society was Sir Robert Moray, a Mason who was not himself a natural philosopher ( Lomas 2002 ). Jonathan Swift satirizes the Royal Society as “Laputa” in Gulliver's Travels ( Toulmin 1961 ), but the general consensus is that frequent communication among specialists is one of the hallmarks of modern science. A “scientometrics” approach makes it clear that the exponential growth in scientific fields and discoveries has resulted in various kinds of networks, including “networks of scientific papers” ( Price 1986 ). It was only gradually over the course of the seventeenth century that the brief scientific paper replaced the book and Newton might well not have written his Principia Mathematica had there not been controversy about his papers on optics; “afterward he did not relish publication until it could take the [then] proper ... log in or subscribe to read full text