【诺奖得主Wilczek科普专栏】爱因斯坦的论文，放在今天能发表吗
Frank Wilczek
弗兰克·维尔切克是麻省理工学院物理学教授、量子色动力学的奠基人之一。因发现了量子色动力学的渐近自由现象，他在2004年获得了诺贝尔物理学奖。
感谢Frank夫人Betsy Devine女士为本专栏配音！
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在过去的一个世纪里，科学期刊与机构变得更加专业化，留给个人风格的空间日益狭窄。
不，问题在于这篇文章的风格。爱因斯坦的论文不符合现代的专业科学交流规范。它从一个关于空间和时间的轻松的哲学讨论开始，然后是关于已有的数学理论（张量微积分）的阐述。这两章就占了文章一半的篇幅，放在今天，这些内容会被认为是与论文核心不相关的部分。更糟的是，文章没有对前人科学研究进行任何引用，也没有任何图。这些缺失对如今的科学论文来说是致命的。这样的文章甚至都不会被编辑送审。
类似的专业化过程也改变了科学领域的其他方面。经费申请，以及去大型天文台或国家实验室进行研究申请，变得更加的结构化，充满繁文缛节。又比如，在开展任何涉及人体实验的工作或者把仪器送上太空之前，都需要完成成堆的文书工作。类似的现象也出现在被誉为高中生诺贝尔奖的再生元科学天才奖（ Regeneron Science Talent Search，此前曾先后由西屋公司和英特尔公司赞助）中。在该奖78年的历史中，最初几十年的获奖项目通常都是那种灵气四溢却仍显天真稚嫩的工作，这也符合人们对那些极具天分的新人的预期。而如今的获奖项目则通常是在知名实验室的实习过程中经过精心打造完成的。
这些专业化趋势几乎是现代科学爆炸性发展的必然结果。标准化和系统化让人们更加容易管理如井喷一般的论文、各类申请和人员。但与此同时，它们也带来了严重的负面效应，即大量无用功都耗费在了突破官僚形式的层层桎梏上，也抬高了新人的准入门槛。
幸运的是，我们也有一些不太正式的、低门槛的机构，比如开放的在线论文库arXiv，在那里，科学论文可以在同行评议之前张贴出来。这使得作者在写作的时候不用特别讲究形式，内容也可以更加广泛。
当然，如果在今天，爱因斯坦也一定会找到办法发表他的研究成果。他会删去论文中哲学讨论的部分，附上引文，把解释性的部分放进“补充材料”中，或者再加一些漂亮的图。精修过后的论文，科学核心当然不会变，但不再给人有同样的阅读享受。
Albert Einstein’s 1915 masterpiece “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” is a joy to read. The first articulation of the theory, it is still the best introduction to the subject, and I recommend it as such to students. But it probably wouldn’t be publishable in a scientific journal today.
Why not? After all, it would pass with flying colors the tests of correctness and significance. And while popular mythology holds that the paper was incomprehensible to its first readers, in fact many papers in theoretical physics are much more difficult.
As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “There was a time when the newspapers said that only 12 men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than 12.”
No, the problem is its style. Einstein’s paper doesn’t fit the mold for modern, professional scientific communication. It starts with a leisurely philosophical discussion of space and time and then continues with an exposition of known mathematics (tensor calculus). Those two sections, which would be considered extraneous today, take up half the paper. Worse, there are zero citations of previous scientists’ work, nor are there any graphics. Those features would doom a paper today. It might not even get past the first editors to be sent out to referees.
A similar process of professionalization has transformed other parts of the scientific landscape. Grant applications are more rigidly structured and elaborate, as are requests for research time at major observatories or national laboratories. And anything involving work with human subjects, or putting instruments in space, involves heaps of paperwork. We see it also in the Regeneron Science Talent Search (formerly sponsored by Westinghouse and then Intel), the Nobel Prize of high school science competitions. In the early decades of its 78-year history, the winning projects were usually the sort of clever but naive, amateurish efforts one might expect of talented beginners working on their own. Today, polished work coming out of internships at established laboratories is the norm.
These professionalizing tendencies are an all-but-inevitable consequence of the explosive growth of modern science. Standardization and system make it easier to manage the fire hose gush of papers, applications and people. But there are serious downsides. A lot of unproductive effort goes into jumping through bureaucratic hoops, and outsiders face entry barriers at every turn.
It is good that we have some less formal, lower-stakes institutions such as arXiv—an open-access online archive where scientific papers can be posted before they are peerreviewed, allowing authors to be less formal and more expansive.
Of course, Einstein would have found his way to publishing his results. He’d prune the philosophy, festoon the paper with citations, put the expository bits into “Supplementary Materials” and maybe add some snazzy graphics. Its scientific core wouldn’t have changed, but the paper might not be the same pleasure to read.
编辑：王茹茹
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