Q & A(bstracts)

Proceedings are useless nowadays

Conference proceedings no longer serve an important role in today's scientific publishing, where time is already not enough to read top papers in the Q1 journals. Initially, they were ranking as high as other channels of dissemination. Think for instance of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, where Maxwell published not only his, but one of humanity's, most important scientific texts, or the famous comparison by Jaynes between his (neoclassical) and quantum theory of light-matter interactions.

But with publishing becoming a business, a grant-making model, the publish or perish way of life, itself leading to forced ranking and scientometrics, a fascination of scientists for the journal rather than the results came to make proceedings both useless, unappealing and disregarded.

Even in that fierce competitive model, proceedings could still serve various purposes: i) they could train junior scientists to write their own, possibly first papers, without "supervision" or "external" influence, and ii) they could provide the opportunity for an alternative way to put things, more detailed, more pedagogical maybe, more personal... they are so many ways to say the same story, especially in science.

Unfortunately, proceedings are typically copy-paste versions of their front-end paper and there is little more annoying than to read twice the same text in different papers, especially if the content is not exactly the same. Proceedings are, nowadays, dead.

Proceedings used to be useful

There has been a practice which the science librarian sometimes encounters, which, to the best of my knowledge, is now essentially abandoned, but that proves to be of inestimable value for epistemological purposes.

Archiving the discussions.

Take the 20th Solvay conference, for instance. The group photo I have is not good but you can still find a vivid picture of the prestigious attendants:

The chair of the event is Mandel, but Paul, not Leonard, although as you can see the latter is still there amongst the participants.

Now, in addition to a paper that formally captures the essence of the live presentation—as we are still used to—there are also so-called "discussion sessions", which are the Q&A post-talk segments, but that have been edited to capture or retain the content of this interesting, in fact, the most interesting part of the oral presentation. Here you can find, for instance, live-looking contributions such as this one from H. Carmichael to the talk (they called it 'lecture') of I. Prigogine, specifically targetting an earlier comment by Prigogine's co-author T. Petrovski (the Chairman is Sudarshan):

And here is the reply, first from Petrovski and then from Prigogine himself, in a tone which I leave to your apreciation:

Note that neither addressed the comment itself, on what seems to be Strong Coupling in cavity QED.

I will not comment at length on this particular excerpt, but this obviously captures something interesting, including at the pure scientific level. For instance, Prigogine (who was an underrated genius, possibly the biggest brain in these exchanges) describing non-Markovianity as a superposition of different timescales is a neat contrast of clarity and inspiration to the technical and mathematical equivalent description of his co-author.

Those contributions appear to be edited, in particular when they come to detailed derivations, such as this later comment by Scully:

I don't reproduce it in full, but clearly this was not simply a "standing question", probably it made use of the blackboard or involved a broad description of the main lines with a posteriori editing. This is Prigogine's reply to that:

Such reports are also recorded for other lectures; the one from C. Cohen-Tannoudji for instance is also very interesting as it reads like a dialogue, with short questions and short replies (except Scully at the end who comes back with «a rough cut at Professor Kimble’s question» and derives a result which he says «deserves, and will receive, a more careful treatment.»

Proceedings could be useful again

In the heat of the moment, such details around a scientific exposition have limited significance. The purified, crafted results are important, not the underlying thoughts or doubts or intuition or comments from the actors producing or challenging them. For the experts fully involved into the matter, every detail counts, but those experts were there anyway, and the rest of the world probably cares little about the mood of an eminent professor challenged with a foolproof suggestion from a brilliant postdoc.

With time, however, memories get altered, especially from the experts and first-account witnesses themselves, at the same time as trifles from the past may become important points in the bigger picture: what were people thinking then? How were they thinking? What was the perception at a given time of something which, most certainly, will have developed and matured considerably with decades passing?

For the historian of Science in particular, such documents are unique. For epistemological purposes—to understand and analyze how one may come to form an understanding or opinion of a result—those are also much better than the purified, distilled version. Even errors, naive comments or irritations can cast a new light on what later became textbook material.

Such detailed records of those «rather lively discussions», as they were described by Mandel [Paul] in the preface, are quite spectacular for the time, where taskforce were also much more able and disposed to great efforts. Nowadays, technology makes such snapshots almost a triviality. There is still need of editing, but nothing that cannot be done single-handedly by a motivated or well-trained archivist.

My intention is to try to revive such archiving. I did try for the PLMCN24 but got badly sick and had to be hospitalized in full flight. I aim to give it another try in the context of our Multiphotonics meeting.