Standing on the shoulders of giants

“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is the familiar image for how new knowledge rests on what came before. Here it becomes a point of departure for a broader claim: science is not only cumulative, but collective. Researchers depend on predecessors, contemporaries, and an open exchange through which evidence is tested, extended, and accepted into shared knowledge.

The Familiar Image and Its Limits

The expression is associated with Newton’s acknowledgment that his insights depended on the work of earlier thinkers. Yet the book stresses the limits of this picture: Newton did much of his theoretical work alone and was preoccupied with being sui generis. The image therefore recognizes intellectual inheritance while still centering the individual whose view is enlarged by what came before.

The text also notes the possibility that Newton’s wording, in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke, was intended as a cruel joke. That complication sits beside the phrase’s later use as a straightforward tribute to predecessors. Whatever its original tone, its conventional meaning captures only part of how scientific knowledge is made.

From Accumulation to Collective Work

Scientists do not depend only on earlier generations. They also rely on contemporaries, whose work is in turn shaped by theirs. A failed hypothesis can still help other researchers by showing where they need not look. Scientific knowledge thus grows not simply as one thinker adds a result to an inherited stock, but through a community whose members make their work available to one another.

The SARS investigation supplies a concrete contrast to the solitary-genius model. The World Health Organization brought eleven laboratories in countries around the world into a collaborative project. Researchers shared data and virus samples, discussed results in daily teleconferences, and pursued different lines of investigation at the same time. The first researcher to spot the coronavirus could be identified, but no one person established that it caused SARS: weeks of work by laboratories across the network were needed to support that conclusion. The group, rather than an isolated discoverer, collectively established the cause.

Publication, Recognition, and Trust

The collective character of science depends on the open circulation of information. Scientists publish discoveries and make data available so others can inspect the evidence, challenge conclusions, and use the results to develop new hypotheses and experiments. In this way, information that might have remained with a few researchers can contribute to what society as a whole knows. Each scientist, in a strict sense, depends on the work of others.

That exchange also serves individual aims. Scientists seek recognition for discoveries and want their work to change how contemporaries think. Yet recognition is conferred by the scientific community, and the pursuit of it can benefit the group: researchers seeking attention make their findings public, where others can evaluate and build on them. The system links self-interest to shared intellectual gains without requiring scientists to be free of self-interest.

A claim’s scientific standing likewise involves collective judgment. The coronavirus caused SARS before the World Health Organization announced the finding, but in scientific terms it became an established cause only when other scientists scrutinized the laboratories’ work and accepted it as evidence. That consensus made it possible for laboratories around the world to pursue tests and vaccines on the basis that SARS was caused by a coronavirus. Collective acceptance does not make truth a matter of opinion; it establishes when evidence has entered the common fund of scientific knowledge.

The Practical Limits of Verification

Experiments should be replicable, but most scientists do not repeat most other researchers’ experiments. In practice, they often rely on the data and procedures reported by colleagues rather than verifying each result themselves. A hypothesis succeeds not because most scientists have personally tested it, but because they find the evidence credible. As a result, scientific work rests on trust as well as on the possibility of replication.

Michael Polanyi’s example makes that dependence concrete: when a researcher cannot reproduce a familiar experiment, the first suspicion may fall on the researcher’s own lack of skill rather than on the established result. Constantly retracing every experiment would consume the time researchers need to make new discoveries, and checking one result itself depends on numerous other things that may not have been independently tested. Experiments can be replicated and fraud can be exposed, but neither possibility removes the ordinary reliance of researchers on one another’s work.

The shoulders image therefore points toward a reciprocal structure, not just a ladder from past thinkers to an individual genius. Earlier knowledge supports new work, while contemporary researchers supply, contest, and extend one another’s evidence. The scientific community’s common knowledge is continually renewed through this exchange, and its judgments depend on the trust that researchers will handle data fairly and on the community’s capacity to distinguish credible hypotheses from unreliable ones.