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Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science
Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.
Ginsparg, a physics professor at Cornell University and a certified MacArthur genius, may have little in common with Al Pacino’s mafia don, but both are united by the feeling that they were denied a graceful exit from what they’ve built. Instead, the objects in the room seemed inert, long since resigned to their fate: unopened boxes from the 1990s, piles of Physics Today magazines, an inexplicable CRT monitor, a tossed-aside invitation to the Obama White House. In 2009, Philip Gibbs, an independent physicist, even created viXra (arXiv spelled backward), a more or less unregulated Wild West where papers on quantum-physico-homeopathy can find their readership, for anyone eager to learn why pi is a lie.
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