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The competitive edge in scienceTo cite this article: Robert P Crease 2000 Phys. World 13 (9) 17

 

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COMMENT: CRITICAL POINT

The competitive edge in scienceScientific competition is more than just a battle for glory and prizes, says Robert P Crease

Scientists make peculiar competitors.Consider the studies on quarks at

CERN in Switzerland and at the Brook-haven National Laboratory in the US. InFebruary scientists at CERN announcedthey had "compelling evidence" for asoup of free quarks and gluons at theSuper Proton Synchrotron (SPS) (PhysicsWorld March 2000 p5). In June physicistsat Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy IonCollider (RHIC) began looking at quarksat ten times the energy of the SPS.Meanwhile, CERN scientists are build-ing the Large Hadron Collider (LHC),which in six years' time will study quarksat 30 times the energy of RHIC.

Media accounts often portray this situ-ation as if the labs are locked in nothingmore than a heated battle for a trophy. (Thequest for the Higgs boson, pitting CERNagainst Fermilab, is another example.) Thecovei'age tends to emphasize the posturing,claim-staking and antagonism, implying thatone lab's gain is the other's loss.

If so, the two labs are also engaged in a lotof perverse behaviour. After all, the Brook-haven lab is building magnets for the LHC,and is a hub for dozens of American institu-tions contributing to the ATLAS detector atthe LHC. Both CERN and Brookhaven alsohave staff members who are - officially andunofficially - helping the other lab's projects.

Two kinds of competitionPoliticians and journalists are bound to findsuch behaviour mysterious and self-defeat-ing. When they compete with others in thesame field, the aim is to secure a prize: anelectoral victory or a news scoop. To gainit means beating your opponents: yourstrength is proportional to their weakness.This is political competition.

But athletes, artists and others who workin a creative community of performers knowanother kind of competition. In performancecompetition, the aim is to achieve a superiorlevel of performance. Individuals enhancetheir own performance by sharing and co-operating with others as much as possible.

To call this "friendly competition" - inother words, to imply that it is simply polit-ical rivalry minus the antagonism -would bewrong. The primary goal is different: it is tosee the overall performance level rise. If yourcompetitor is strong, so are you. It is not thatthe competitors do not care about winning.They are striving to win. But in performancecompetition, winning is not everything, oreven the most important thing.

Drew Hyland, a philosopher from TrinityCollege in Connecticut, has argued persuas-

Success - will the claim that researchers at CERN have madea soup of free quarks and gluons spur on other physicists?

ively that winning is indeed not the mostimportant thing in true competition. Hy-land finds two features of competition espe-cially significant. One is that competition iscollaborative: "com-petitio" literally meansto seek or strive together. The second is thatcompetition elicits a superior level of playfrom its participants. As Hyland points out,competitors are thrust by their mutual strug-gle into situations of greater than normal"immediacy, intensity and immersion", inwhich they can do things that they could nototherwise - or at least not as well.

What he calls "alienated" competition -when competition degenerates into mere op-position — amounts to a breakdown of truecompetition. What is essential for true com-petition is a collaborative and mutually sup-portive community, in which performerstake risks and respect each other's risk-taking- however much they may also be mercilesscritics of each other's performance.

Hyland points to familiar features of com-petition that support his argument: the con-cern for improvement and excellence inperformance (for "doing it right"); the desireto seek difficult (not merely obtainable) goalsand to find challenging (not merely beatable)opponents; and the fact that competition isfun. Of course, performance competition inscience can degenerate into political compe-tition, where the quest for priority, publicityor prizes becomes paramount.

And the competitive situation is morecomplicated in science where industrial orgovernmental sponsors are involved. Whenthe stakes are high, sponsors may try toshape the game as a political competition. In1952, for example, Brookhaven scientistscame across a magnet technique knownas "strong focusing" that vastly improvedaccelerator beams, and excitedly commu-nicated the information to colleagues/rivals

at CERN and the Lawrence BerkeleyLaboratory. The)'were astounded whenthe US Atomic Energy Commissionasked them to keep the details a secret.(It was too late.) The commission, ittranspired, was also sponsoring a top-secret accelerator-based technique tomake weapons-grade nuclear material,for which the agency thought strongfocusing might be applicable.

The critical pointWhen discoveries in science are difficultand counterintuitive, and the stakes arehigh, it may make military or economicsense from a sponsor's point of view torequire the participants to behave asthough they were involved in political

competition. The discovery of atomic fis-sion on the threshold of the Second WorldWar is a classic military example. The fiercepolitical battles that erupted after the waramong high-energy physics labs for acceler-ators and detectors is another instance.

Recently, the agencies sponsoring Ameri-can participation in the LHC haw proscribedAmericans from formal collaboration onALICE, the LHC experiment dedicated toheavy-ion physics. (Ironically, ALICE'S mag-net, inherited from a previous experiment,was largely paid for by die US Department ofEnergy.) The principle seems to be that thelimited US funds for heavy-ion researchought to go to Americans. Still, Brookhavenand CERN heavy-ion researchers are findinginformal ways to collaborate via e-mail, visits,phone calls and other means. "We do every-thing together," one told me.

Politicians and journalists will not be ableto understand such behaviour. They thinkthat because prizes and prestige are involved,the aim of the game is to do everything onecan, within the rules, to \vin. They think allcompetition is political competition.

But artists, athletes, scientists and otherswho work in a community of mutually sup-portive creative performers will smile. Theyknow that, in reality, being part of such acommunity is the truest way to compete.

h t tp : / / ce rn .web .cern .ch /CERN/Announcements/2000/NewStateMatter« wvw.pubaf.bnl.gw/pr/biilprO209OO.html

Robert P Crease | s In the

Department of Philosophy,

State University of New York

at Stony Brook, and historian

at the Brookhaven National

Laboratory, US, e-mail rcrease

©notes.cc3unysb.edu

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