The danger of scientific meetings going online only.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the cancellation of countless conferences and workshops across the globe since the start of the year. Some, such as the American Physical Society’s March and April meetings, managed to move online and others are now planning likewise. With the possibility that international face-to-face meetings could be at least a year away, online seems set to become the “new normal”.

Despite some initial technical hiccups, online tools such as Zoom have been shown to offer many advantages. They’re cheap to use and we can reduce our carbon footprint by not travelling unnecessarily to distant international locations for meetings that usually last several days. Online tools also let people with, say, child-care issues or visa restrictions take part in conferences that they may have otherwise have found difficult to attend.

At first sight, it looks like the pandemic – together with increasing concerns over climate change – could lead to a new and more efficient form of doing science. But could a wholesale shift online turn out to be misguided? While there are many positives of such a move, there are many dangers too. A world based entirely on online interactions could hamper the progress of science and damage its relationship to society.

We need to be aware of these issues now before they potentially take hold. If we don’t, then it may be difficult, or perhaps impossible, to unravel the long-term effects given that they could take a generation to emerge.


Building trust

Before COVID-19, face-to-face communication at physical conferences was the norm. It is not only quick and efficient (once you’ve made your way to the location that is) but it also plays a fundamental role in the social aspects of science. At such meetings, scientists often develop a common “language” that is not only learned by students but also developed and improved upon by researchers.

It is this process of “socialization” that teaches values central to science and the distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable criticisms. And, of course, face-to-face meetings are where new topics, collaborations and communities emerge. This is because when people meet, they are – consciously or unconsciously – more likely to commit to fresh ideas or new approaches.

There is a kind of “spinning flywheel” here that is based on the trust and mutual understanding that has already built up. This makes it possible to easily move online, at least in the short term, without much difficulty so that the early online experiences are likely to be good.

An obvious example was the confirmation of the discovery of gravitational waves, which was announced at a press conference in February 2016. All the previous five months’ worth of work had been done via teleconference and thousands of e-mails without any face-to-face international meetings. But there is one crucial element: it was all based on decades of trust that had been built up in hundreds of face-to-face meetings beforehand.

The dangers, then, of a wholesale shift to online meetings will only arise as science develops and changes. When that happens, old languages and relationships become irrelevant – older scientists leave the profession and new ones enter: the flywheel loses momentum. This means that new generations need to be inducted into the fundamental norm of integrity, which defines the social institution of science and the foundations of the scientific discipline. It starts with education, where at meetings the relationship of authority and truth in science is revealed because a PhD student can, and sometimes does, criticize a Nobel laureate. That truth must be seen to trump authority is another crucial value of science.

In the current wholesale shift to online we expect to see success in the short term but increasing difficulties for the development of new science in the medium term. In the longer term, if online becomes the new norm, the challenges could extend far beyond science itself. Such a move will erode the boundary between scientific expertise and online tools such as social media.

The aspects that make science special are all developed through face-to-face socialization and it doesn’t seem to happen naturally over the Internet. Indeed, if the boundary between information and misinformation comes to be fought out over the Internet rather than the seminar or workshop, science will lose the battle, as it nearly has, for example, in the revolt against the MMR vaccine, or, in some locales, the acceptance of climate change.

The rise of populism in Western countries and the attack on scientific expertise has put society in danger. The way that science deals with decision-making in the face of uncertainty is a vital lesson for decision making by elected governments. At the same time, scientific expertise acts as one of the checks and balances in pluralist democracies. Respect for scientific expertise prevents a political leader from insisting on anything they like such as the truth about climate change. Without science as an exemplar of how to make difficult decisions in an uncertain world – such as with the effect of COVID-19 – we will find ourselves living in a dystopia. We have to get this right.

We need to travel less, and of course, take advantage of what online has to offer and seek to improve it. But the new enthusiasm for virtual meetings must not turn the current short-term successes into a long-term disaster. For areas that are well established there is perhaps less danger for a shift to an online world, but for those that involve much disagreement and passion, face-to-face will be the only way to propel the science forward.

PhysicsWorld. Posted: July 02, 2020.