Mission Statement
If you trap a scientist in a box, and promise to only let them out when they tell you why they love science, you will get a lot of high-minded, esoteric, and well intentioned lies. Repeat the experiment, this time anonymous, and most of them will tell you that we get paid to learn things and talk to smart people. Ideas are born here; in the idle chat between experiments and over coffee at 3 am after the 10th failure in a row. Unfortunately, in science these ideas are monetized. Grants are awarded based on the ideas and proposed experiments of the applicants. Scholarships and fellowships follow suit, directly awarding money based on independent research (one’s own ideas, yet again monetized). Outside of teaching, grants are how you make money; which means ideas must be protected and hoarded like gold even when you can’t use them. Projects are written down, then pocketed “just in case” and are subsequently lost for years. And so, every year, thousands of ideas, brilliant and stupid, go unexamined because someone wants credit for an idea that is by definition not solely their own and that they cannot pursue.
We have tried the walled-garden approach to scientific ideas, but all that has clearly illustrated is that the bottleneck isn’t ideas, but execution. Go talk to any scientist; they all have stories of great ideas that went nowhere due to a thousand silly, practical reasons. The purpose of The Apeiron is to remove the primary wall in that garden: credit. The Apeiron is a depository for the loved, but orphaned ideas, where they can be uploaded, broadcast anonymously, and protected under a GNU license to prevent abuse. By removing the specter of credit, we hope we can remove some of the reticence to share ideas, and no one can monetize the exchange, increasing user comfort and increasing the overall rate of communication. This will be complimented by the fact that the posts will be inherently ephemeral; disappearing from the site weekly, preventing build-up of repeat ideas and questions.
In addition, this site by construction is a real-time update on cutting edge scientific ideas and concerns and will be complimented by analysis scripts designed for users to analyze data and metadata for the most recent version of the The Apeiron. Here, interested users would be able to search for trending topics in various research areas and perform other analytics. This fulfills the full goal of The Apeiron; to be a self-referencing semi-autonomous source of ideas and data.
