> I've convince myself at least, that US science and technology has been
> deeply deformed by the historical purges of the late 40s, and we keep
> seeing those effects. Meanwhile, the capitalist and especially the
> capital on steriods neoliberal oriented modes of production keep
> re-enforcing and re-introducing these effects: individualism and
> competitiveness to the point of combat, ownership of ideas,
> etc. Noting that most scientific papers list a group of names is no
> solice to me, since there is a distinct and very customary hierarchy to
> such a list. In the other direction, when I go back to the history of
> math and physics in Weimar, all I can see is a deeply `socialistic'
> spirit in the great cooperative efforts that laid the foundations of
> modern math and physics. And within that era, one of the dominate
> themes was to make the ideas and work public and understandable.
I wonder how much of this kind of culture is specific to sub-discipline. My working hypothesis is that it's related to the potential for filthy lucre.
Back in 'Nam, I interned at Fermilab. You would think at first that the atmosphere would be similar to that you describe at LBL, not least since it's under the DOE. I imagine to an outsider it looks all the same. Thing was, aside from the people who build and possibly run the thing, it was pretty much an academic existence with academic payscales. It was also, until recently, about the most cordial and sociable working environments I'd ever experienced. There was a certain cog-in-a-very-big-machine aspect to it that turned me off, and a sense of rivalry between groups, but none of the proprietary spirit that you mention.
That's one of the things that I love about what I'm doing now. While discussing grad school with with me, a previous patron of mine, a political conservative, muttered something about developing people "for the good of the [scientific] community". I'd just dragged my bleeding carcass out of IT and this comment startled and disoriented me. There's been a creeping sense of gloom as the money gradually gets tighter over the years, but within the field it just feels very different from the nastiness you see in a lot of endevours.
-- Andy