Boston

The normally tranquil world of statistical physics and mechanics was rocked last week by a computer glitch that led to a flurry of exchanges over nominations for the field's most prestigious prize, the Boltzmann Medal. The prize is awarded by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) once every three years.

The glitch triggered a debate between those who regarded the proliferating e-mail messages as a nuisance that threatened to overwhelm computer networks, and others who welcomed an unaccustomed openness.

The source of the problem was the 3,500-strong mailing list kept by the Center for Mathematical Sciences Research at Rutgers University, which hosts two conferences on statistical mechanics each year.

Kurt Binder of the University of Mainz in Germany, who chairs the IUPAP committee that issues the Boltzmann Medal, asked Joel Lebowitz — a member of the nominating committee — to send an announcement soliciting nominations. (The next prize will be awarded in Mexico, in summer 2001.) Recipients were meant to reply to him alone, not sending their comments to each other.

Juerg Froehlich of Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich nominated John Cardy of Oxford University, also citing the work of Sasha Zamolodchikov of Rutgers. “But something went wrong,” says Lebowitz. “The computer went haywire” when Froehlich hit the ‘reply’ button, and his suggestions went to all 3,500 on the list.

Others soon joined in the nomination frenzy. Roger Bidaux of the Centre d'Etudes de Saclay in France advanced the name of Lawrence Schulman, a physicist at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. “I believe that our community can afford a little bit of tolerance and democracy, and allow me to express my opinion,” wrote Bidaux.

University of Rochester physicist Yonathan Shapir shared this sentiment, saying he'd like to see the process conducted in a more open, democratic fashion.

“There is a lot of secrecy in academia,” says Shapir. “I don't like the way this business is handled, with just a few people making decisions for the rest of us.” The Internet, he adds, “could allow us to hold large ‘town meetings,’ where many people voice their opinions and, in the end, a vote is taken”.

Several respondents, though, argued that nominations should not be aired in public.

Meanwhile, Haym Benaroya of Rutgers was anxious to avert an e-mail meltdown, and urged people to stop sending messages to the Rutgers list. “At one point, I was getting 10 to 15 e-mails every 10 minutes,” he says. “With everybody talking to everybody else, things were snowballing. The whole system could have been shut down.”

The snafu was corrected within a day, and an apology issued. Future nominations were requested by post, rather than e-mail.

The apology put an official end to the episode. But Shapir hopes that an important lesson might still be learned. As a result of the computer glitch, he says, “for a brief period of time, we got a glimpse of how things could be done. We don't have to cling to the secretive ways of the past.”