The Big Bang Never Happened

■ IMPLICATIONS ■Alfven's antimatter cosmology and the symmetries and asymmetriesof matter and antimatter, which are certainly fundamental tothe structure of both.The extension of Krisch's work is also key. Beginning in 1994,a highly sensitive version of his spin-aligned target will be insertedin the beam of the Soviet Union's new UNK accelerator.This will extend the range of spin-effect studies from 28 GeV to3 TeV, over one hundred times higher in energy, providing vitalhigh-energy data on spin effects, and giving a clear test to allalternative theories.But experimentation alone will not suffice; there must also bea freer debate of the results. As I mentioned in Chapter One,with the present peer-review system such debate is difficult atbest. For each specialized journal, papers are reviewed by thevery people whose pet theories are being challenged. The factthat a paper may appear in another journal is of little account,because the specialization of science fragments debate—astronomersdon't read plasma physics journals.The current system of specialized peer review originated inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as science becamemore closely tied to, and supported by, large-scale capitalistenterprise. While inventor-entrepreneurs like Thomas Edisonchose for themselves what to research, the later financierindustrialistswanted the "quality of work" guaranteed in advance.So they, together with leading academics, encouraged theidea of peer review—the inspection of scientific work by the"best authorities" in a given field.At the same time, the growing industrialization of scientificresearch led to an increasing level of specialization. The oldergeneration of scientists had picked their research topics accordingto their own interests and often hopped across an entire field(as the best twentieth-century scientists continue to do). But asscientific research became organized in large-scale industriallabs, and as university work fell under the sway of industrialconcerns, research came to focus on specific topics of commercialneed, and scientists were encouraged to devote their entire careerto single specialties.The combination of growing specialization and the peerreviewsystem have fractured science into isolated domains,374