It is intriguing to note that modern science began shortly after the invention of the printing press. When Nicolas Copernicus presented his heliocentric and heretical view of the universe in 1543, he was only able to do so, claim some historians, because he had access to a diverse range of printed sources that enabled him to compare and contrast older ideas. Such materials are also said to have allowed Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and others to pick up where Copernicus left off, free of prejudice and armed with precise mathematical tables that would prove vital in driving the scientific revolution forward.
Whether or not this version of history is correct, few would deny that the transition from manuscripts to print had a profound effect on scholarly communication. Without the printing press it would have been inconceivable to, for instance, produce tables of sines and logarithms that were accurate enough to be useful. Most importantly, however, printing allowed new knowledge to be widely disseminated, generating a need among a growing number of proto-scientists to stake claims of ownership. Scientific publishing was born, with a handful of academic journals in place by the end of the 17th century.
Today, the act of producing persuasive claims to new knowledge, evaluating them through peer review and making them available to others remains at the core of physics and every other science. Indeed, in terms of a commodity, physics is nothing but the information that appears in the many thousands of academic journals that exist worldwide, a fraction of which ends up in textbooks and even less trickles down into common knowledge. But scientists and the £5bn publishing industry that has sprung up around them are now grappling with the next sea change in the way human beings communicate: the Internet.
In the January edition of Physics World, Matthew Chalmers explores how the World Wide Web is changing the way physicists do their research, from preprint servers such as arXiv.org, to the free-to-edit online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.
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