From: hal@finney.org
Date: Tue Jun 15 1999 - 09:10:54 MDT
Rak Razam, <shazaman@netspace.net.au>, asks:
> I'm de-lurking for a bit of advice> does anyone have any links to any
> news sites that list breakthroughs in science and technology and related
> stuff??? Thanking you>>>
I don't know of any really good ones. I do read news.com and wired.com
most days to keep up with breaking technology and internet news.
But they focus mostly on the computer industry. Most of the news sites
have "tech" or "science" or "health" links which will have a new story
every day or two.
Wouldn't it be cool to have a site which would list new math, or physics,
or engineering papers which had been published in the past week or month,
especially the ones deemed important or original by experts in the field?
There are plenty of papers being published, and for most of them there
is a reasonably large collection of experts who read them and can quickly
identify which ones are important. So this would be mostly a matter of
pulling together the right people and getting them involved.
One problem these days is that the good stuff tends to be released
gradually. First there will be seminars in which the researchers
describe their results informally, then a preprint will be circulated in
a closed community with requests that it not be forwarded, then it may be
published online in some form, and finally it makes it into a journal,
months or even years later. At each step the results are improved due
to comments and reviews by other people. At the earliest stages the
results are still tentative and may not prove out. So by the time the
papers is released for public viewing most of the top names in the field
will already know the results.
Hal
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