On the sociology of science

The common lore is sometimes that scientists are not like the rest of human beings: they are always objective, never subjective, they never let anything in their personal beliefs to interefere in their research, and that they only fight relentlessly for the immaculate progress of the human knowledge. While very well suited for publicity, this view of scientists is really far from the actual reality. One of my collaborators, a recently appointed ICREA researcher at the University of Barcelona, has in his office a very funny (and realistic) quotation which I cannot reproduce exactly now, but which reads something like "Unlike what is commonly thought by journalists and mothers of scientists, not only all the scientists are not unique genious, some or them are really stupid ".

A scientist is not an espiritual creature separated from the material world, is as human as everyone else, with a set of beliefs, fears and hopes like you and me. Everyone who belongs to any university knows perfectly that many decisions are based not on objective criteria on the quality of the people but on some more subjective (and mundane) reasons. Although in the scientific world this effect is greatly mitigated with respect other areas of knowledge (my father, a law full professor, has explained me some stories which some times do not let me sleep), it is still there. I remember that when I got my first somewhat agressive referee report from a paper of mine, my Ph.D. advisor said that he should think if he had any enemy (in the academic sense of course) that could be responsible for that.

Apart from that, also the subjective judgement of the importance of some research plays a very important role in how science works in real life. Einstein never managed to get a research position (even permanent) before he published his famous papers in 1905, Yukawa got rejected the paper that would give him the Nobel prize and one of the creator of string theory has to painfully mantain himself from temporary position from temporary position while he has working in something that almost everyone then thought was completely irrelevant.

The bottom line is that scientist are human, and science is a human activity as any other. It is obvious that unlike other disciplines knownledge in science advances in a monotonic way (after all, it looks for the correspondence of our reason with reality), but it is a path with all difficulties and suffering associated to our human condition.