Thought Experiment: Science as an Open Source Projectby Timo
Hannay Come with me to Athens. It's the fifth century B.C.,
around the time of Socrates, and the first ever proto-hacker--
let's call him Taikalukathes--is doing what hackers do best:
He's thinking. As he ponders the fauna of his student bedsit, he
considers an old wives' tale that says fleas cause rats to
scratch. As many have done before him, he wonders about the
truth of the tale. But unlike his predecessors, Taikalukathes
also thinks hard about how he might go about testing it and, in
a flash of inspiration, he comes up with the most wonderful
means: He will take a rat that he knows to have fleas, and
another that he knows to be flea-free, and he'll count the
number of times that they each scratch in a given time period.
His results support the old wives' tale and Taikalukathes
becomes just a little bit wiser than any other man. If that were
the end of the tale, this wouldn't be a story worth telling, but
Taikalukathes does one more remarkable th