17-March-2005, 06:49 PM
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Senior Member
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 6,508
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Originally Posted by Argos
Again, another pillar, if not of the of the modern scientific method, but at least of the scientific ethics, is the principle of publicity: you report your finding as soon as you have one. With the scientific research depending on the money of third parties, as corporate and governmental instances, a scientist canīt get away with the results, or keep them hid. The lone hermetic scientist is no more.
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I challenge that one. Publication is a principle of science today (in the public sector!), but that was not always so. Remeber the competition between Cardano and Tartaglia.
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Tartaglia is perhaps best known today for his conflicts with Gerolamo Cardano. Cardano nagged Tartaglia into revealing his solution to the cubic equations, by promising not to publish them. Several years later, Cardano happened to see unpublished work by Scipione dal Ferro who independently came up with the same solution as Tartaglia. As the unpublished work was dated before Tartaglia's, Cardano decided his promise could be broken, and included Tartaglia's solution in his next publication. In spite of the fact that Cardano credited his discovery, Tartaglia was extremely upset. He responded by publicly insulting Cardano personally as well as professionally.
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The general outline of Tartaglia's dispute with Cardano is clear. There is no doubt that Tartaglia attempted to keep his solutions secret. (We may question the extent of Cardano's culpability. He may have believed either that he had an independent source for the results, or that he had significantly improved and changed Tartaglia's methods.) To understand the point of Tartaglia's secrecy, we must recognize that in 16th century Italy, even theoretic knowledge without technical application had special professional significance for those privy to it. In 1535, Tartaglia had enhanced his reputation in a mathematical duel in which the contestants, without divulging method, solved cubic equations presented by their opponents. This sort of challenge only makes sense in an intellectual tradition that emphasizes secret knowledge passed on to select students. Although the custom was changing, Tartaglia was responding to a tradition in which a master's reputation depended on the amount of secret information he could pass on.
interesting post
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