People often see science as a world apart: cool, rational and untouched by persuasion or performance. In this view, scientists simply discover truth, and truth speaks for itself.
But history tells a different story. Scientific theories do not simply reveal themselves; they compete for attention, credibility and uptake. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once suggested that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” a line that helped popularize the metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas.”
