PARIS – Given current AI capabilities, does it matter who conducts scientific research? The intuitive response is that a fact is a fact, regardless of who finds it. But knowledge is never disseminated that way.
We receive most scientific claims without any means of checking them ourselves, so we tend to judge not the claim but the credibility of whoever stands behind it. As the Harvard historian of science Steven Shapin shows, the production of scientific truth has long been inseparable from the social work of persuading one’s peers. My own research on scientific mobility, conducted a quarter-century ago, pointed in the same direction from a different angle.
Reputation in science does not reside in ideas alone; it concentrates in a small number of institutional hubs: departments and laboratories whose standing lends weight to whatever emerges from them. A scientist leaving a leading center carries part of its credibility along and can, under the right conditions, turn the receiving institution into a center of gravity in its own right.
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