This is a guest post composed by Keith B. Rodenhausen and Stefan Schöche at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln NSF Messenger workshop.
“We are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the borders of any subject matter or discipline.” -Karl Popper
Gauss may have written his papers by himself, but today academic publications are steadily gaining a larger author list. Why is this? Mott Greene discussed this trend in Nature. To the writer go the spoils of credit, and the question of who invented a process or discovered an important phenomenon can be a messy business! The policy of one author to a paper (and accurate postmarking) neatly handled these controversies. But as time passes, the sheer amount of knowledge scientists must accumulate before they can begin contributing, themselves, has grown. To some extent, we compress knowledge by having students learn more ...
