ZIERLER: Michael, we’ve already covered what you’re doing currently, so for the last part of our talk, I’d like to ask a retrospective question, and then we’ll end looking to the future. Between quantum information and open science, I wonder if you’ve thought broadly about the Kuhnian idea of scientific revolutions. Both quantum information and open science were not areas that he thought about. But to the extent that you believe in that paradigm—and I don’t know if you; that’s a question in and of itself—how does your expertise or the reality of these fields influence the idea of scientific progress, the idea of scientific revolutions?
NIELSEN: Just focusing on Kuhn, he had a very narrow sense of what a scientific revolution is. One of the most common criticisms of him is that he was too focused on physics in particular; and to some extent, chemistry. He was originally trained as a theoretical physicist, and it really shows in his writing. Something like quantum mechanics or general relativity is disrupting an existing order. Well, quantum information isn’t disrupting any existing order. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of ex-classical information theorists who are, all of a sudden, put out of a job because they’ve been superseded by this new notion. In that sense, just a whole lot of his description doesn’t apply. It’s too narrow a way of thinking.
Still, I loved his book. I read it when I was, I think, 18 or 19. It’s deeply influenced the way I think about science. But I also think it’s wrong in a whole bunch of important ways, and too narrow. It’s not a good description of either quantum information or of open science. Open science is, as I said before, really a revolution in the political economy of science. That’s what it is most fundamentally. He barely talks about political economy at all in that book.
Interesting quote by Michael Nielsen: