Random Thought: Open Science

While out of my walk just now (brrrrr... I have a rule to not go walking when it is below freezing - and it was just 33 degrees, but sunny!), I thought about one of the proverb posters that I did last year and how it is important to the issue of openness and sharing (i.e. the lack of openness and sharing) that really concerns me about Janux and its walled garden. That theme of open access is also important to science as a whole, too, of course.

So, this poster, which is made with a medieval Latin bit of rhyming verse, shows that the need for open knowledge is not just a modern concern. The medieval monks thought about that too, dependent as they were on the sharing of manuscripts! So here is the poster, and below I've included the Latin text and an English translation (for more information and additional posters like this, see my Proverb Laboratory blog post):

When knowledge is hidden away, it rots;
when it is shared publicly, it grows.

Latin: Condita tabescit, vulgata scientia crescit.

Condita (hidden away) tabescit (it rots),
vulgata (publicly shared) scientia (knowledge) crescit (grows).

This is a so-called Leonine hexameter, characteristic of the Middle Ages. The classical Roman poets also used hexameters like this, but they avoided the use of rhyme, unlike the medieval poets who loved rhyme, as you can see from the internal rhyme here: tabescit-crescit. I also love rhyming Latin verse, which is why, as a general rule, I prefer medieval verse to classical. :-)