
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/20...ecret.html
EXCERPT: Laughlin points out that scientific secrecy benefits both government and business. In commerce, many scientific facts are hidden under the banner of trade secrets, which Laughlin amusingly describes as part of everyday deception in business. Scientists have a difficult time recognizing just how at odds this is with their own natural desire to share discoveries, but “now and then they notice less-gifted individuals zooming by in their Lamborghinis on the way to vacation hideaways, restaurants, and parties, sometimes waving a cheery greeting as they pass.”
Considering this confluence of official and commercial suppression of scientific knowledge, it seems likely that the world is suffused with topics that have already been explored, but whose records have been kept from view. The historian of science Peter Galison, in his 2004 essay, “Removing Knowledge,” speculated about the issue’s magnitude. “The closed world,” Galison remarks, “is not a small strongbox in the corner of our collective house of codified and stored knowledge. It is we in the open world—we who study the world lodged in our libraries, from aardvarks to zymurgy, we who are living in a modest information booth facing outwards, our unseeing backs to a vast and classified empire we barely know.” (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: Laughlin points out that scientific secrecy benefits both government and business. In commerce, many scientific facts are hidden under the banner of trade secrets, which Laughlin amusingly describes as part of everyday deception in business. Scientists have a difficult time recognizing just how at odds this is with their own natural desire to share discoveries, but “now and then they notice less-gifted individuals zooming by in their Lamborghinis on the way to vacation hideaways, restaurants, and parties, sometimes waving a cheery greeting as they pass.”
Considering this confluence of official and commercial suppression of scientific knowledge, it seems likely that the world is suffused with topics that have already been explored, but whose records have been kept from view. The historian of science Peter Galison, in his 2004 essay, “Removing Knowledge,” speculated about the issue’s magnitude. “The closed world,” Galison remarks, “is not a small strongbox in the corner of our collective house of codified and stored knowledge. It is we in the open world—we who study the world lodged in our libraries, from aardvarks to zymurgy, we who are living in a modest information booth facing outwards, our unseeing backs to a vast and classified empire we barely know.” (MORE - missing details)