Dawsonzhu@aol.com wrote:
> Tim Ikeda wrote:
>
>
>> Most likely, >85% of this unpublished 90% is crap, but with search
>> engines, is there now enough storage and filtering capability to
>> locate
>> gems and justify the effort? And how? Online notebooks? An E-journal
>> of
>> Negative
>> and Partial Results? Is there some form of editorial control and
>> publication
>> quality assurance that would work in a high-data, low information
>> environment?
>
..................................................
> (3) Finally, no result is in fact sometimes an important
> result. Michelson and Morley is perhaps a good historic
> example.
This may not be the best example of the sort of thing Tim is
asking about, for the importance of the MM experiment was seen pretty
quickly by the physics community. Another example is the the discovery
of some physicists as far back as the late 20s (including one of my
profs at Johns Hopkins) that some strange asymmetries showed up when
they used electrons from beta decay in experiments. None of them at the
time saw the significance of this & just used electrons from a cathode
instead. In retrospect they were seeing the weak interaction's
violation of parity conservation which wasn't appreciated until 1956 (I
think).
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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