Laughlin replies: Rather than respond to these letters individually, I will take the long view and point out that, together, they say some important things about the discipline. The sentiments expressed largely match those sent to me privately, except that my mail is more positive. Judging from anecdotal evidence, I think the positive mix more accurately reflects the sentiment among physicists generally, but that is hard to quantify. However, even with the balance in this group of letters, it is clear that there is a terrible schism among professional physicists over the whole question of scientific ownership, and there are profoundly different perceptions of exactly the same facts. Reading some of the criticism, I am reminded of the scene in Mel Brooks’s movie Young Frankenstein, in which Dr Frankenstein asks Igor how he lives with his hump and Igor answers, “What hump?”
A design problem in writing a short piece is that insufficient space to say things defensibly inevitably generates misunderstandings. For example, I took enormous care not to impugn property but somehow managed to get labeled as anti-property anyway. So let me set the record straight by stating that I strongly support technological property and the engineering activity that generates it. I would love to be an engineer, but it is too late. I am in my fifties and—worse—am trained as a theorist. I also agree that de facto property in universities is exactly the same as private property, and that dumping on industry just because it is private is the most despicable hypocrisy.
My point was not that property is bad but that property is owned, and that its ownership has implications. In light of the difficulty the more irritated respondents had in acknowledging this fact, I find myself wondering just who needs a refresher course in economics. To get at the matter of deception, I had to speak in vague abstractions for the obvious reason that specifics are grounds for lawsuits. Those of you who have never seen any corruption should just dismiss what I say. Those of you who have seen corruption know what I mean.
I cannot resist the temptation to respond to a few specific points, although they are peripheral to the central, important matter of the controversy itself. The business page of the New York Times of 28 February 2003 reports that Microsoft Corp has given the government of China access to the source code for Windows®. Windows is an immediate and easily understandable counterexample to the assertion that full disclosure is good for technological business. As everyone knows, the reason Microsoft does not simply make the source code open to the world is because the company would be swiftly destroyed if it did. The notorious proprietary nature of that code is the basis of its entire business. I know many other instances of the importance of technological secrecy—for example, my colleague Bill Little’s decision not to patent certain aspects of his Joule-Thompson refrigerator technology because it would have been an invitation for theft. As to the benign effects of secrecy, the Enron and WorldCom scandals were facilitated by secrecy, not by the inherently corrupt nature of business. True, the folks involved were not scientists, but it is not true that scientists are orders of magnitude more honest than everyone else. The integrity of science comes only from its openness and its ethic of “trust but verify,” to paraphrase Ronald Reagan. As to my own university’s private energy-research initiative, I note that this activity is engineering, not science, and thus irrelevant to the discussion.
In the end, however, I must emphasize that my piece was not intended to indict anyone making a living doing practical things. The Schön affair has occurred in the context of very hard times for physics, in which everyone, including me, has spent sleepless nights wondering how to move forward. My proposed solution is simply to focus on integrity as the sustaining asset, even as one makes the compromises necessary to do one’s job. Actually, this is not such bad advice generally.
