So what we have in the Big Bang news, basically, is the same thing we had with the Higgs news: a disconnect between traditional systems of scientific codification and newer, nimbler ones—a tension between publicity strategies within scientific institutions and beyond them. It's not as stark a dichotomy as journal publication-vs.-web publication ... but it's close. There are, after all, competing pressures at play: on the one hand, the pressure to be first; on the other, the pressure to be right. And the latter pressure, ideally, trumps the former. Take the announcement of cold fusion (or, more accurately, "cold fusion"); in 1989, the chemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman announced—to great fanfare, and via a widely publicized press conference—that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature. In a jar of water. This was hailed as "the greatest discovery since fire" ... until none of the chemists' colleagues were able to replicate their work. Now the whole thing is treated as a cautionary tale.

Compounding these pressures in the case of the Big Bang news is the fact that physics in particular is a notoriously competitive field; its researchers are racing each other, always, to discovery. (This also makes it a notoriously secretive field: Bjorn Carey, Stanford's science information officer, told me that the Big Bang news was considered "top secret" until it was shared publicly.)

The speed imperative leads to tensions in many other fields beyond science (journalism certainly among them); we're all, in our own ways, figuring out how to navigate this platform for instant publication we now have at our disposal. The Big Bang news is simply emblematic of a larger trend. As the philosopher David Weinberger puts it: “Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives.”

So the web, with its anyone-can-publish capacities, may well be aiding a movement away from traditional—which is to say, unassisted—peer review. In addition to, and occasionally instead of, embracing the intentional inefficiencies of the peer-to-publish approach to acceptance, many scientists are posting their findings directly to sites like arXiv.org, the online repository of yet-to-be-published scholarly research. ArXiv is a popular site, and a regular in the RSS feeds of many science journalists; to publish a study on its platform is to invite media coverage for its findings, peer-reviewed or (as is usually the case) not.

There are also, with the help of university press offices and their increasingly sophisticated adoption of social media platforms, more deliberate invitations to public dissemination of work that has yet to be peer-reviewed. This week's Big Bang news, as befits its bigness, came to us via, among other avenues: press conference, web-blasted press release, web-based news article, and Stanford-produced YouTube video. This was scientific discovery at its most publicly tentacular.

Which may also be scientific discovery at its most productive. “I think people are recognizing that, in this age of very exchangeable information, making things as public as possible is a really good idea,” says Samuel Arbesman, a network scientist and the author of the book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. “In science, it used to be that you wrote books,” he told me: You compiled your findings, you published them, and—BOOM—your results had a public life. And if you wanted to communicate those findings with the world more rapidly than a book would allow … you were pretty much out of luck. “So the scientific paper,” Arbesman says, “was the response to trying to make sure you could actually publish bite-sized bits of knowledge and discovery more rapidly. And it was great technology.”