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Why there is a place for you in the Timepiece community

There are two independent processes, which combined constitute science:

1. the production of scientific knowledge;

2. the use of scientific knowledge by the society.

To define scientific knowledge, we cite [1]:

“[...]scientific knowledge is distinguished from other intellectual artefacts of human society by the fact that its contents are consensible. By this I mean that each message should not be so obscure or ambiguous that the recipient is unable either to give it whole-hearted assent or to offer well-founded objections. The goal of science, moreover, is to achieve the maximum degree of consensuality. Ideally the general body of scientific knowledge should consist of facts and principles that are firmly established and accepted without serious doubt, by an overwhelming majority of competent, well-informed scientists. As we shall see, it is convenient to distinguish between a consensible message with the potentiality for eventually contributing to a consensus, and a consensual statement that has been fully tested and is universally agreed. We may say, indeed, that consensibility is a necessary condition for any scientific communication, whereas only a small proportion of the whole body of science is undeniably consensual at a given moment.”

Thus, the root of the reliability of scientific knowledge is that it is always potentially consensual. Given a scientific message, anyone can produce another scientific message stating what are the necessary conditions for him to agree with the original message. Note that it is crucial for everyone to be free to disagree with any message, therefore the scientific knowledge cannot be fully consensual by definition.

The second process is the use of the scientific knowledge by the society. There is no viable society where everyone is free to disagree with everyone else about everything, that would be an anarchy. Despite that the scientific knowledge is reliable, the society is not and it cannot be reliable and thus its use of the scientific knowledge is necessarily (very) far from perfect. Because the scientific knowledge must be effectively used by the society sooner or later, science is overall unreliable. Science has the reliability of its weakest link: the society. To illustrate the unreliability of the use of scientific knowledge by the society, we cite [2]:

"one might have expected that actually producing biased science would have a stronger influence on public opinion than merely sharing others’ results. But when one compares the two treatments we consider above, there are strong senses in which the less invasive, more subtle strategy of selective sharing is more effective than biased production, all things considered, particularly when the scientific community is large and the problem at hand is difficult (or the power of generic experiments is low). The reason is that such a scientific community will produce, on its own, plenty of research that, taken without proper context, lends credence to falsehoods. [...] Industrial selection involves identifying methods already present among the community of scientists that tend to favor one’s preferred outcome, and then funding scientists who already use those methods. [...] by increasing the number of ambient industry-favorable results in a scientific literature, and then further amplifying those results by sharing them selectively, propagandists can have an even stronger effect. [...] there is little incentive, and often few resources, for individual scientists produce consistently high quality studies. And as we have seen, low powered studies are more likely to spuriously support erroneous conclusions. [...] the regular publication and acceptance of ultimately incorrect results is certainly troubling. But the arguments and results we have given here suggest that even more is at stake: the same sorts of conditions that lead to a replication crisis in the first place also provide extra fodder for industrial propaganda."

See also DORA. Note that quantum physics is specially vulnerable to propaganda, since the scientific community is large, the theory is complex and producing and testing its predictions is an extremely expensive process (which by itself generates conflicts of interests and propaganda promoted from within the scientific community). Moreover, expertise in quantum physics is relevant to develop and plan for nuclear weapons, nuclear energy and a strong industrial sector, so strategic interests and counterinformation from nations and large corporations are also involved.

To be clear, the production of an article (by article we mean a Pub or a comment to a Pub) constitutes production of scientific knowledge whenever:

1. the article has a potentially consensual scientific message. To achieve this in the Timepiece community, we require that the message is formulated using standard mathematical methods and that the article is clear and pedagogical as much as possible;

2. it is publicly accessible in a scientific repository (such as Pubpub, arXiv or Zenodo), and all its references are also accessible (publicly or through Library Genesis);

3. it can be easily found (and contested) by anyone interested in the subject of the article, using modern search engines such as Semanticscholar or Microsoft Academic.

The process of "publication" of the article in a scientific journal is an attempt to improve the effective (and not the potential) consensus in the society about the scientific message contained in the article; it is a use of the scientific knowledge by the society which (while being part of science) does not have the same reliability as the scientific knowledge itself.

In the Timepiece community, there is a place for any kind of scientific knowledge about the mathematical inconsistencies of Statistical Field Theory and its consequences for Quantum Mechanics (as long as there are resources available to give it the attention it deserves). Note that we may consider that an article is unrelated to the subject of the Timepiece community or that we do not have resources available to give the article the attention it deserves, but that would not imply that such article is not scientific knowledge, it only means that the Timepiece community (which is far from perfect, as any other community) did not find a solution to make a better use of such article.