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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: back to Park (ID:fanpu2019), author: qu Lijian

Although the term "civil science" is a description of human identity, the scientific community should not identify an astonishing scientific work as an epoch-making research or a trivial delusion. When Einstein, a third-level patentee without a doctorate, submitted his paper on special relativity without any references, how did the reviewer break the identity bias and find its great value?

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Chinese mathematician Lu Jiaxi. His tragic fate has aroused heated debate, and at the same time, it is his identity that has aroused heated discussion. Before his death, he was an ordinary middle school physics teacher in Baotou. Although the middle school is also a formal institution, the middle school physics teacher is really far from the forefront of mathematics, so some people regard his achievements as a "victory of civil science."

Originally, "civil science" only refers to the abbreviation of "folk scientist" working in atypical scientific research institutions, and has no substantive derogatory meaning, but in the current general context, "civil science" often refers to those who refuse to accept formal scientific research norms and are close to "scientific delusions" in spirit, which is referred to as "science delusion", which is exactly the same as the English crank corresponding to "civil science" (for simplicity). The "civil science" mentioned below is all in the sense of crank. In fact, such people may not all be in the private sector, and it is not uncommon in formal academic institutions to have doctorates that are actually close to "civil science". This is why people satirize some seemingly unreliable "official" studies as "civil work", although these ironies are not necessarily correct.

In the early years, Mr. Lu Jiaxi contributed papers to domestic academic journals, probably because of his identity, he only received a few words of rejection letters from the editor, and did not receive any comments of academic value, resulting in his loss of priority for some major achievements.

If teacher Lu Jiaxi's paper enters the review process according to the normal process, how can a professional mathematician, who sees that the author of the paper is a physics teacher in a middle school in Baotou, judge that the manuscript in his hand is a valuable paper, not a civil paper?

The book how to think independently gives as many as 15 characteristics of civil science [1]. Philosopher Lafleur's classic paper gives seven criteria for identifying civil subjects [2]. Jeremy Bernstein, a science writer, says two standards are enough. The author has a poor memory and prefers standard and concise ones.

The two criteria put forward by Bernstein to identify whether a brand-new theory is a civil theory are:

Contain the old theory and explain why it works

Predict new phenomena and test them

Suppose in 1905, a physicist reviewed a paper from Einstein. The author was a 26-year-old clerk in the patent office. He did not have a doctorate and had not published a high-level paper before. If the physicist has no prejudice against human identity, can he apply the above two criteria to make a correct judgment on whether Einstein's paper is a civil science article?

Yes, if he is a physicist with a passing academic level and a serious attitude towards his work.

Standard 1: contain the old theory Einstein's 1905 article on the theory of relativity, there are many strange conclusions at first glance, such as time expansion, length contraction, whether two events occur at the same time related to the observer, and the mass of the object increases with the increase of speed. If limited to common sense, hasty reviewers, and considering the identity of the author, Einstein's papers may be classified as civil science articles and killed.

A calm, professional reviewer will resist this impulse and read the full text carefully and will find that the above uncommon sense strange effects can only be seen in objects moving close to the speed of light. If the speed of objects is much less than the speed of light, the weird relativistic world will naturally transition to our common sense world.

What is the relativistic effect in the world around us?

In 1905, when Einstein published his theory of relativity, the fastest speed one could experience was the speed of a sleigh race, hundreds of kilometers per hour, only a few millionths of the speed of light. The mass of sleigh athletes who move at high speed is only about 10-12 times higher than when they are still. So, not surprisingly, we don't experience relativistic effects in our daily lives.

In short, there is no contradiction between Einstein's new theory and the existing theory.

How will the civil science article be written?

For example, a typical article about perpetual motion machine, a hot topic in civil science. Articles generally have a lot of boldface characters and many inexplicable terms. These are not the fatal wounds of civil science articles.

Every physicist knows that any perpetual motion machine violates the first or second law of thermodynamics. Of course, like any law of physics, the law of thermodynamics must be based on experiments. So far, all our life experiences, scientific experiments and theories are consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.

Therefore, the article that demonstrates the perpetual motion machine must explain why the new equipment he designed or the new theory he conceived can violate the laws of thermodynamics. What have people ignored about the laws of thermodynamics for a long time? How to contain the traditional laws of thermodynamics? However, the articles of civil science are unknown, and the author has never seen an article that answers these questions seriously in the spirit of science.

The civil science is immersed in its own small world and does not understand that every scientific researcher must embed his work into the scientific knowledge network. If there is a paper on perpetual motion machine to tell today's scientists that some aspects of the laws of thermodynamics that we have accepted for a long time have actually been ignored by us, after considering these neglected aspects, perpetual motion machine can actually be realized. if such an article is logical and calculated correctly, it will not be easily abandoned by scientists, but will scramble to circulate and study it carefully. Its correctness is fully discussed.

Unfortunately, many civil subjects who think they have been suppressed by "official subjects" are not interested in knowledge networks. if you point out the defects of the perpetual motion machine equipment designed by him, some people will come up with a new design the next day, ignoring the defects you pointed out. on the contrary, some people accuse regular scientists of not understanding, trapped in traditional knowledge, not accepting innovation, or even saying that they have encountered scientific bullying.

Standard 2: predict new phenomena that can be tested. Real scientific ideas should make predictions in order to carry out experimental tests. On the other hand, the civil science department often makes it clear that the ingenious instruments he invented can be "moved forever", but he will not carry out experimental tests, nor will he give experimental testing methods.

In contrast, Einstein's paper in 1905 gave a number of predictions. For example, as mentioned earlier, the mass of an object increases with the increase of speed. For ordinary objects, this effect is very small and difficult to measure. However, in Einstein's time, it was already known that there was an object that moved at a speed close to the speed of light, and that was the electron.

In 1896, the French physicist Becquerel discovered the radioactivity of uranium. There are electrons in the radiated particles at a speed comparable to the speed of light. Therefore, measuring the mass of the emitted electrons is expected to verify Einstein's prediction.

In fact, the relevant experiments were done by the German physicist Walter Kaufman before Einstein proposed the theory of relativity. he discovered that the mass of electrons depended on its speed in 1901-1903. He made a more accurate experiment in 1905, believing that it negated Einstein's theory of relativity and made it face a crisis of trust. But Einstein believed that his theory was correct, and his strength was that he thought his theory was beautiful enough. Other physicists refuted Kaufman in terms of experimental techniques and results, supporting Einstein's theory of relativity. Continuing experiments show that Kaufman's 1905 results are problematic. It was not until 1940 that the experimental accuracy was enough to determine that Einstein's prediction of speed dependence on mass was correct.

However, Einstein's paper on the theory of relativity in 1905 also had wrong predictions. Based on time expansion, he predicted that the clocks at the equator were slower than those at the poles, 1200 and 1/100000000 seconds a day. Although Einstein lived in the watch kingdom at that time, he did not expect to be able to verify this prophecy at that time. Einstein did not think at that time that the clock was affected not only by speed but also by gravity, which was predicted by the general theory of relativity many years later. Combining special and general relativity predictions, clocks should go as fast at the equator as at the poles. In 1977, American physicists used atomic clocks to confirm this prediction.

A scientific paper must have a testable prediction, which does not require the author to make a test in person, nor does it require a test in a short period of time, even if it can be tested in principle. However, civil science is often addicted to its own magnificent and bold conjecture, unwilling to think about it and unable to think about how to test its own conjecture.

Conclusion: in short, Einstein's papers are papers that can be taken seriously by their scientific counterparts and will not be classified as civil science articles. Of course, we cannot say that Einstein's paper will certainly be accepted and published. In Einstein's era, there was no such thing as today, to find three or five reviewers to review papers. As long as one person raised objections, the fate of the papers would be worrying. It was Planck who quickly saw the level and value of Einstein's paper, and one person made the decision to publish Einstein's paper. He did not wear tinted glasses to view Einstein's "folk" identity.

In terms of identity, Einstein did not work in formal academic institutions and did live among the people. But for such scientists, considering the current actual social context, we better call them "amateur scientists" or "marginal scientists" (fringe scientist), in order to work as "professional scientists" relative to formal academic institutions. Apart from identity, amateur scientists work in the same way as professional scientists, and some people have made outstanding contributions to scientific progress. However, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, Mr. Lu Jiaxi, his achievements in mathematics do mainly rely on personal struggle, but he has long been ignored by domestic "officials" because of his identity, and he is not as lucky as Einstein.

At the same time, it is worth mentioning that in China, Lu Jiaxi is not only a scientist from the folk and finally recognized by the academic circles, but also a paleontologist, Zheng Xiaoting, who dropped out of junior high school. In addition, there is no shortage of scientists who have already obtained formal teaching posts or even made great achievements, but their origins are also somewhat of a "civil science" flavor. As a contrast, in fact, there are many examples at home and abroad that come from prestigious universities, have a doctorate but act the same as those of "civil science". I will not repeat them here.

It can be seen that daily language often does not have the effect of "as the name implies". In order to reduce misunderstandings in communication, and in view of the fact that the phenomenon of civil science has long been the object of study in the sense of sociology [4], academic language focuses on precision, so it is time to give an appropriate name to "folk scientist".

reference

Tian Song. The basic definition and cause analysis of folk science enthusiasts. The study of dialectics of nature. 2003, 19 (7): 56-60.

[2] Lafleur, Laurence J. "Cranks and Scientists." The Scientific Monthly 73, no. 5 (1951): 284-90. Http://www.jstor.org/stable/20436.

[3] Cranks, Quarks And The Cosmos: Writings On Science, Jeremy Bernstein, New York: Basic Books, 1993.

[4] Tian Song. The basic definition and cause analysis of folk science enthusiasts. The study of dialectics of nature. 2003, 19 (7): 56-60.

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