Matteo Cantiello edited Main.tex  about 8 years ago

Commit id: bd7ca7f896dd8055453453f3a90a750d773ca77d

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Einstein published in 1916 the paper containing the prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. It has just one author (A.E. himself) and consists of a few pages of text and equations \cite{1916SPAW.......688E}.  Fast forward exactly 100 years, the LIGO collaboration announced in a paper that they discovered what Einstein had predicted. The paper has more than 1000 co-authors and it condenses, in just a few pages of text, equations and figures, an enormous amount of technical information \cite{PhysRevLett.116.061102}.  \textbf{The Einstein and LIGO papers that, respectively, predicted and proved observed  gravitational waves are very similar in format. So much has changed in 100 years of science. So little has changed in 100 years of scientific publishing}. The complexity of the LIGO experiment is astounding, as well as the details of what scientists needed to do to reach this milestone. Measuring a change in length \href{https://www.authorea.com/101461}{equivalent to 1/1000 the diameter of a proton} is not an easy endeavor. And yet the sheer technological and intellectual progress that we witnessed in the last century, with the rise of the internet and large scale computing, is not reflected in the methods we use to write up our science. Little has changed since the time of Einstein. Actually not much has changed since the time of Galileo either! Galileo is one of the founding fathers of the scientific method and one of the first people \href{https://www.authorea.com/6316}{to ever publish a scientific paper} in 1610. That's 400+ years of scientific advancement and we're still disseminating papers in paper format (or PDF, which is, really, just paper).