The Collective Science Platform

The present issue attempts to contribute to rational criticism in psychology, focusing on the belief that psychological measurement has been achieved. If we adopted the modest hypothesis that responses to assessment tests are not measurements (brute facts)--but mere assessments (social facts)--, the challenge would consists in falsifying this hypothesis against empirical evidence, in which case something like an empirical law would have been discovered. The mainstream stance is quite the opposite, immodest one, as Joel Michell (2000) denounced it: psychological tests are presented as measurement instruments, although the assumption of measurability of various "constructs" is pathologically not tested. Günter Trendler (2009) remarked that the experimental control required to develop measurement instruments is not fulfilled in the case of psychological phenomena. I recommend the reading of these two papers for their erudition, clarity, and logical strictness. If you find one wrong statement, please let us know and let us examine it! I included H. M. Johson's 1936 paper, which is a milestone in the history of scientific psychology as a discipline more interested in scientific truth than in social success. I added a paper I co-authored with Emilie Lacot and Mohammad Afzali, who were two of my doctoral students; Lacot et al. (2016) developed the idea that the ritualized, statistical content of "validation papers" in the assessment literature could be replaced by falsification studies--it is easy to test that responses to assessment tests are not measurements because if they were, they were simply ordered--, which are compatible with a detailed exposition of the usefulness of test responses or test scores in practical settings--where what is at stake is good decision-making in ignorance of the real state of affairs. In Vautier and Afzali (2015), it is shown how to test whether multivariate ratings of one's mood on visual analogue scales can be thought of as measurements. Critical comments are very welcome! Last but not least, I like the spririt of a platform like the SJS, which allows one to disseminate scientific results or ideas even if these results or ideas do not match other non-scientific criteria that can be necessary for publication in the current 'evaluative system' (see Bon, Taylor, and McDowell, 2017). Since the commenting feature of self-journals is not available yet, I invite you to get in touch with me at vautier@univ-tlse2.fr if you want to discuss the ideas presented in this issue.

Human beings love to travel. The reasons are multiple, one of them is simply to explore what is unknown, in this sense, a scientist is nothing but a traveler in the unknown world of knowledge. Therefore as a curious scientist, when I discovered for the first time the idea of Alcubierre, part of my adventurous mind started to heat up. I will try in this issue of my journal to share my interest for this idea, to present the founding article (1994) and some selected reactions to this novel idea. I do not pretend by any means to be neither exhaustive nor precise. However I hope to draw your attention to this bizarre idea that within general relativity, it is theoretically possible to use a rocket in order to travel faster than light without breaking Lorentz invariance. As a global conclusion, I presented the very idea of wrap drive and some of its limitations. In the past 10 years, the NASA was even investing to build an experiment to challenge the wrap drive. It was possible to enjoy also a very positive and enthusiastic webpage on their website. However the last time I checked, it seems they have completely changed their views on wrap drive, maybe based on the "inconclusive" results of experiments carried out in 2012 and 2013. They now present a very brief note: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warp.html. While wrap drive is an attractive idea for the reason mentioned in the introduction: traveling fascinates any human being, the theoretical implementation of this idea has brought mainly pitfalls.

Most scientists consider computers as tools they use for performing specific tasks, such as number crunching or data visualization. However, computers can play another important role in scientific research that is not yet sufficiently appreciated: the act of formulating a scientific problem in a computer language is in itself a useful step in understanding the problem, because computer languages enforce precision and do not tolerate ambiguity. The first article in this issue introduces this aspect using an example well-known to every physicist: Langrangian mechanics. The second article discusses it in the context of computer science. The third article describes the role of computers in exploring rather than formalizing new concepts. The remaining articles provide applications from various contexts, ranging from high-school maths education to quantum mechanics or the construction of musical instruments. One conclusion from these works is that scientists should not consider the time spent on writing computer programs as a wasted effort, nor try to delegate it to someone else at any cost. While writing computer programs has purely technical aspects (resource management, optimization, dependencies, maintenance, etc.) which tend to take up a lot of time, it is nevertheless an activity that contributes to scientific understanding. Another conclusion is that computer languages should be considered a form of scientific notation. Unfortunately, very few computer languages were designed with this role in mind, and therefore scientists writing programs often feel that they have to wrestle with inconvenient notation. But computing is still a young field, so there is hope for improvement. A final conclusion is that computers are likely to acquire more profound roles in science than number crunching or bibliography management. In the not so distant future, computers will change the way we approach scientific questions, from the first steps of exploring new concepts via the formalization of scientific models to the analysis of their consequence. To make the best of the new possibilities that computers have to offer, scientists should take an active role in their development. Today most scientists see themselves as mere clients of the computer scientists and engineers who develop computing technology. I believe that a closer collaboration would be desirable, and I hope that this collection of articles will contribute to establishing a dialog about the roles of computers in scientific research.

Electrophoresis is the underlying mechanism for a broad range of essential analysis techniques in colloid science, biochemistry, and biotechnology. The electrophoretic mobility (drift velocity in a viscous medium under application of external electric field) of proteins and other macromolecules is a very sensitive indicator of their internal charge state, their interaction with the surrounding environment, and their hydrodynamic radius. As such, it has been used for sorting a mixture of macromolecules or studying their conformational changes due to chemical reactions or physical adsorption to other molecules. Capillary- and gel- electrophoresis are two of the most widely used methods of measuring electrophoretic mobility in ensembles of molecules. These methods, however powerful, are too slow for following the temporal dynamics of a kinetic reaction. In the existing devices, the smallest measured sample volume (in the nanolitre range) is limited by the optical detection sensitivity. This minimal volume still contains millions of molecules and each molecules proceeds on a stochastic and unsynchronized path throughout the reaction. While statistical methods can be used to uncover the reaction rates for simple processes, this is a daunting task for multi-step reactions. In an ensemble measurement, the observation of intermediate states is often impossible because of averaging over unsynchronized and inhomogeneous processes. This is why single molecule studies have played a very central role in uncovering the intermediate steps of biomolecular and catalytic reactions. Single particle measurements are not prone to disturbance by impurities because these event can be singled out in data analysis. Furthermore, such measurements can be repeated as many times as necessary for collecting reliable and informative statistics. In other words, when the physicists’ granular view of a reaction on a single particle is reconstructed by a direct measurement, the characteristic kinetics and thermodynamics of the reaction is no more obscured by material inhomogeneities or stochastic dynamics over the metastable intermediate states. Important chemical reactions, such as photo-catalysis or enzyme-catalysis, involve multiple steps of largely differing timescales. Furthermore, their reaction rates can be heterogeneous within an ensemble of catalyst particles and can even vary over time for a single catalyst particle. In principle, there is no fundamental barrier for studying a full chain of chemical reactions on a single molecule or nanoparticle through monitoring its electrophoretic mobility, IF (and that is indeed a big IF) one could track the single molecule motion BOTH on the shortest necessary timescales AND as long as the reaction is complete. Actually, in a glorified experiment more than a century ago, Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher mastered measuring the drift velocity of a floating charged particle continuously to a level that they could set an accuracy record for the value of the elementary charge. The challenge we still face is how to perform that measurement on a single particle or even a single molecule, rapidly enough for resolving the reaction steps. The significance of reaching this goal is self-evident: if a researcher can monitor the charge (or the electrophoretic mobility) of a single solute rapidly enough, she or he will be able to study kinetic interactions such as ionization, hydrolysis, or charge transfer at the single particle level. In such a measurement, one can directly "track" the intermediate steps of a reaction, which are smeared out in bulk experiments because each molecule follows its own pathway stochastically. In this issue, I comment on a handful of experimental reports that, in my view, together make a convincing case that monitoring chemical reactions on mobile nanoparticles and single molecules is within experimental reach. I start with Millikan's 1911 article in the Physical Review where he presented his (or their, more on this later) first measurements of charges on a single oil droplet. Next comes the anti-Brownian (ABEL) trap developed by Cohen and Moerner which teaches out how to shrink the size of the probed particle to the nanometer scale and to perform the experiment inside dense fluids. In this 100-year fast forward, I skip all the remarkable developments around trapping single atoms and single electrons in vacuum inside quadropole traps with the excuse that those are passive, while Millikan and Cohen trap particles in their setups by using an active (visual) feedback. Another recent experiment by Beunis et al, performed in a passive optical trap, reconfirms elementary charge sensitivity of drift velocity measurements now in dense inorganic fluids, albeit on micrometer size dielectric particles. On a parallel token, I take a beautiful demonstration of sensitivity of capillary electrophoresis to elementary charge differences, here in ensembles of proteins, in the group of Whitesides. The fringe contrast of these charge ladders, limited mostly by the finite size of the measured sample, testifies to sufficient durability of charges in such biomolecules well below the elementary charge fluctuation. These results also signify the importance of long-duration measurements for monitoring charge fluctuations. Short duration of mobility measurement, due to photobleaching, and coarse time resolution, due to the limited photon budget, are the two major limitation of the ABEL trap for monitoring such chemical reactions that I envision. This is inherent to any technique that is based on fluorescence detection. I conclude this issue with one experimental report on particle tracking based on elastic light scattering and a feasibility study for performing equivalent of Millikan's experiment with small nanoparticles and even some macromolecules.

In this issue, I selected a few items I consider good food for thoughts about the systemic flaws of today's publishing industry, and I offer some of the many reflections they inspired me. It is hard to investigate problems at systemic level. The first article I have selected is a modelization of peer review. The second is a quantitative result about peer review. The third is a blog post and a summary of concerns with the impact factor. The last is my own proposition for a system fix. I intend to release several other issues to cover this topic in a deeper way. Have a good read !